Patrick Pichette of Google dampened expectations for any jaw-dropping new hardware from Motorola any time soon, as The Verge noted yesterday afternoon. Speaking at this week’s Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, Google’s chief financial officer and senior vice president said:

We’ve inherited 18 months of pipeline that we actually have to drain right now, while we’re actually building the next wave of innovation and product lines…. We have to go through this transition. These are not easy transitions.

Pichette added that “our own kind of work is actually quite promising,” subtly damning the gadgets currently in production at Motorola. That might not have been a big problem a year ago, when no other manufacturer had done much to co-opt Google’s mobile operating system and create a kind of uber-Android ecosystem. But Samsung has made it clear that it plans to leverage its dominance as an Android manufacturer by aggressively expanding into the world of apps as well as the mobile enterprise. If Samsung executes well this year — and I think it will — Google will be playing catch-up by the time it drains Motorola’s pipeline.