Not a zypper oddity, zypper is just giving more information. Trying to update with e.g. warehouse was giving "no update candidate".

There might not be a vendor now, but there used to be! It was meego for the older packages (at least, that's what zypper said when I forced an upgrade: changing vendor "meego -> ").

Perhaps something in the SDK or build environment used to add meego as vendor if none was specified, and you're building in a new SDK which doesn't do that any more?

It's not a problem because you can always uninstall and reinstall, or do what I did and force the update using zypper, but people are unlikely to understand why it won't update.