I wish the 8.9 ups the ante, but that's only speculation blown out of proportions.

Why would you prefer the Exynos to the Tegra2 btw?
From what I've seen they both offer the same CPU (1GHz Dualcore A9) and GPU (50-80MPPS vs 71MPPS) performance. What's different is that Exynos actually is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have the (PVR, ATITC, DXT) shaders/textures implemented so there are some apps/games that crash.

And the only way for it to work is if the app developers actually rewrites their apps to support the ETC textures. Or a really gifted developer actually writes a brand new driver. It is unlikely that a firmware update will fix this unless the gpu manufacturer revises their drivers (so its not up to Samsung).

And on top of this the Tegra Zone is slowly building up titles (in HD) and these are only supported on devices with Tegra2 under the bonnet.

And from a development perspective, it would be better choosing the Tegra2 device since this processsor is shared in other devices that you can share some code ... for eg if you wanted to lets say port a Sense Rom from a HTC Tegra2phone, it would be much more difficult doing so on an Exynos device rather than a Tegra2 device.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1068567
http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1090032
http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1056933