The thing about clocks is, they sit in only one position, so there's no justification for a tourbillon, which averages out the errors caused by change of position.
Haha, awesome. Since the tourbillon spring mechanism seems to be constantly rotated with the gyro version, I wonder if there is another way to mechanically keep the tourbillon always level?
Wouldn’t that render it useless though? The purpose of tourbillon is specifically to cancel the effect gravity has on watches or clocks that are stationary. This was a problem with pocket watches that had a mechanism always in the same direction. Tourbillons in wrist watches are largely only for decorative purpose as the hands move and thus the gravity effect averages out.
Some number of tiny swinging weights could be used to establish the direction of gravity and the escapement could be slowly rotated until it's perpendicular to that direction. Edit: Or let the escapement hang. There's probably reasons why that's difficult.
If you want a watch with a neat movement that is widely available, get a Swatch Sistem 51. Granted it has 5x as many moving parts as the Zenith Defy Lab, but it is actually affordable and pretty neat.
Wow, that really is some serious cost-cutting. As he says none of the Chinese manufacturers have gone that far in cost-cutting; even their cheapest mechanical watches have a fully metal movement that is theoretically serviceable as normal (and some of them are really cheap).
This movement is the output of a combined R&D lab for LVMH watch brands (Tag, Zenith, Hublot, Bulgari). So the movement will likely to be rolled out to watches by all of those brands.
