What's perhaps more revealing is Bamford's statement that HTC's software guys had "not a lot of time" with ICS before they released Sense 4, and had to build key components in isolation from the new OS. This could explain why HTC was forced to see sense (ahem) and tone down its custom layer.

ENGADGET: HTC exec: we didn't have much time with ICS when making Sense 4, but our skin is still better