Least predictable election ever...?

Ming is the main man. And a great result for us blogging mingers.
The media seemed entirely uncertain about which way this one was going to go, but the betting exchanges, and bookmakers always seemed to have Ming on top.
I think the least predictable aspect of the election wasn't who was going to win the most first preferences, but who was going to get Hughes' 2nd preferences. As it turned out, they split almost neatly 50:50 between Huhne and Campbell, rather than skewed to Huhne as some previous polling had suggested. This even split meant that in the end it was a relatively comfortable win for Ming.
But why were the 2nd preferences so evenly split? My hypothesis is that the armchair members aren't nearly so ideological as the activists, and that if you believed Hughes' supporters there was no way they would ever give Ming a 2nd preference, and that they'd cast it to Huhne as a "stop Ming" approach. But the armchair members probably gave their preferences to the two most recognisable faces on the ballot paper (Hughes and Ming), and cared little for the supposedly huge differences in platforms.
What does it all mean? Huhne is the "big winner", in that he will have leapt from moderate obscuraty amongst the members to being more high profile. Will he be a leader in waiting? Possibly. His team will have collected a large amount of internal canvas data for future use.