2500 engineers in China?
Wow - that's a lot of friggin engineers.
My impression of 3com in recent years is that after they became an also-ran in the US market, they basically gutted their US operations and outsourced most engineering and production to China. (To a company famous for copying Cisco IOS and putting it in their products, until Cisco sued them several times.)
Now that Cisco has buried the hatchet and 3com bought out the Huawei/3com joint venture, and since H3C/3com now has a large Chinese marketshare and an indigenous technology platform, as well as a tie-in to low-cost Chinese manufacturing capability, I can see why that appeals to HP.
What's not so clear is how they will integrate the product lines. I've really liked recent Procurve equipment in terms of features, stability, user-interface, cosmetics and value. I hope that won't go out the window in favor of the Huawei/3com-based product.