Hewlett-Packard is just in time for this year’s tablet summer showdown. The company moves on after series of bumps that include Hurd, Oracle and financial debacles with an iPad competitor. Today marks one of the biggest day (so far) of the year for Leo Apotheker and HP with the anticipated launch of TouchPad—a move that makes them an official member of the burgeoning tablet OS community. Along with the early but mixed reviews, it’s the debut of HP’s webOS operating system in another device other than smartphone that makes the release a noteworthy one.

In a sit-down interview with Walt Mossberg at the D9 Conference, Apotheker laid out the blueprints for webOS and how they are tackling the “new HP” strategy:

“Our ambition is to create an environment where actually you don’t need to flip devices. You can use the same device, you live in the same world. The device and the cloud system should figure out if you are doing enterprise or professional work or private work. I’d like to create webOS business that has capability to create a synergy on the device in the cloud, so that all of your kind of life, all of your social network lives, your outlook calendar or your professional life—all of these should come together.”

When asked about who he considers as their prime competition, he pointed out that they are a technology company that is going against a bunch of leaders in the industry. He named Apple as their opponent in the consumer aspect, Epson in printing, IBM in the enterprise facet, and the list goes on. He safely remarked that he worries about all of these guys, but what keeps him awake at night are the emerging players, the newbies that has the massive potential to overthrow giants in a single day.

Apotheker also relived the time that Palm were there but just couldn’t get hold of the market and they needed a bigger company like HP to develop their operating system, webOS that is. Now, his team is currently in negotiations to license webOS to other manufacturers.

The same interview highlighted a very interesting concept that goes along with the introduction of TouchPad in the market: it shows that the company has the opportunity to create end-to-end solution for consumers. We know for a fact that they are hardware lords; in fact the largest computer manufacturing enterprise in the world. They are also in the process of building out more of a cloud system. With webOS, they now have the ability to inject their own software platform in any device that they want.