Looking at the pictures in our sample gallery, you'll be hard pressed to pick out any softness, because they've been shrunken down to a mere 800 x 600 pixels in size, a situation that's mirrored when viewing pictures on the phone, so you can definitely see HTC's motivation for optimizing its software to make things look good at lower resolutions.
In his most straightforward comment to date on the power that comes from optimizing hardware and software from the ground up, Ballmer sounds a lot like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who launched the the engineered-system concept about four years ago with the first version of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.