Yes, they port a Quake3 level VIEWER...i can do that too with mediocre performance. But as soon as you add something that a real game requires, like collision detection let alone adding a physics engine, you are stuck. The device has no FPU. That doesn't really matter that much for the graphics itself because that's basically pushing data chunks down the GL pipeline, but for any floating point calculation, it simply kills performance. A mobile device that claims that it can do 3D, that even may have a dedicated GPU, should have a FPU IMHO.
Anyway, i'll try to optimize some floating point code and see if that helps.