HP introduced the TouchPad tablet in February. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

It certainly wasn’t poorly performing software that killed the TouchPad.

Sources at The Next Web reports that HP’s webOS team hacked an iPad 2 to run the software — and it ended up running more than twice as fast on Apple’s tablet as on the TouchPad.

Even before the TouchPad tablet or Pre smartphone were officially released, the webOS developer team was so fed up with HP’s lackluster hardware that they “wanted them gone.”

HP rocked the tech world yesterday when it announced the company would no longer be producing webOS hardware, including the TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphones, after acquiring Palm last year for $1.2 billion. The webOS software could still be licensed to third-party manufacturers. HP CEO Leo Apotheker cited lack of traction in the marketplace as a major reason for abandoning the mobile operation.

The team of developers also deployed webOS within the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser and got similarly speedy results. The TouchPad features a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with A8 architecture, while the iPad 2 houses a dual-core A5 chip based on the faster Cortex-A9 architecture.

According to The Next Web:

The hardware reportedly stopped the team from innovating beyond certain points because it was slow and imposed constraints, which was highlighted when webOS was loaded on to Apple’s iPad device and found to run the platform significantly faster than the device for which it was originally developed.

I personally checked out the HP Veer when it debuted, and I found webOS to be really refreshing and intuitive. My main issues with the device were definitely hardware-based: not enough memory, and not a powerful enough processor.