You can load the GEL apk's for that. I have it on my 2013 N7, and it works like a charm.
My concerns are a bit more complicated. Just enough fear, uncertainty and doubt to keep me from pulling the trigger on another Nexus 7 until I see how things work out. And, I suppose some of this is shaded by the fact that I was bitten by a bug in the 4.2 update for my 2012 Nexus 7 that ruined automatic brightness and was never addressed despite a very long thread in their support forums.
I see it somewhat as Google trying to have their cake and eat it, too regarding their 18 months of support for their Nexus devices. They'll update you to the latest version of Android, but they aren't going to do much in the way of bugfixing, optimization, or finding workarounds for simple issues. They'll save their time and effort by focusing on their latest hardware alone, and get the joy of including exclusive features that encourage people to upgrade to a new device rather than waiting the full 18 months. Again, this isn't just about the GEL, but the automatic brightness issue (which they never seem to have officially acknowledged), or ignoring the 2012 Nexus 7 performance issues for a full year before finally adding TRIM support, or the problems with Nexus 4s being caught in a bootup loop with the 4.3 update.
The 2013 Nexus 7 hasn't even been out 4 months yet, but it isn't being officially supported with some substantial features. Some of those features might merit exclusion, such as the "OK, Google" hotword detection running whenever you are on a homescreen, since the Snapdragon 800 in the Nexus 5 is one of the few SoCs that can offload the voice recognition to specialized hardware, thus reducing power consumption. And I suppose that I have to include the translucent status and navigation bars which apparently performed poorly on the Nexus 10. That said, the other features, such as drag-and-drop reordering of homescreens, Google Now occupying the leftmost homescreen and always running (I understand that there is no delay to launch it, because it is already a part of the homescreen) are substantial features, and don't seem to me to be the sort of things which would substantially increase the system requirements.
Even the voice recognition would have a simple workaround. Seeing as it has been integrated into Google Now for awhile now, and runs whenever you launch Google Now, it seems to me that they could just activate it as soon as you swipe to the leftmost homescreen on hardware which cannot handle it being activated all of the time on every homescreen.
If this were fingerprint scanning, IR support, or 64-bit extensions, which are all things which cannot be worked around, I would understand. When it comes down to (I should say if it comes down to, since they might reverse course in the future) being unwilling to code simple workarounds to support those who've bought your most recent tablets, I get a bit frustrated.
Anyway, I do like my Nexus devices, and I am glad that I do have Android updates, but they are not doing a very good job addressing issues with individual devices. They are acting like they are experimental or developmental devices which can be ignored whenever something new comes along. But they are selling them as consumer devices, and for the most part, I am fine with that. But don't pretend that Android is all the love a device needs. You need to do some device-specific bug fixing and optimization, too.
And with that, I am going to stop rewriting and just post this rant.
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