It's hard to say what the culprit is, but if we had to guess, we'd point our finger at Sense and the amount of pixels rendered on the Vivid's qHD screen versus the Skyrocket's WVGA. The Vivid's consistent loss to Moto's similarly clocked beastie and its TI OMAP 4430 processor also caught us off guard.
Though, today's decision by the ITC to toss Moto's complaint against Cupertino regarding the use of sensors to control the interface of a phone, might be one of the final blows struck.
We can't really see Apple going it alone on this one for hardware's sake, and their partnership with Moto, which once seemed so promising, now appears rocky at best after the nano quasi-betrayal (his namely evidenced by Moto's wandering musicphone eye, lining up some seriosu musicphones without iTunes left and right post ROKR E1, like the ROKR E2).