It appears that the loading of content into the tabstrip divs is sensitive to any whitespace between the <div></div> tags.
So in the example below html-content-snippet.html will not load in either div (in fact it appears the xhr call is never fired).
Perhaps this is by design but it took me a bit to figure this nuance out.
<div id="tabstrip">
<ul>
<li>First Tab</li>
<li>Second Tab</li>
</ul>
<div> </div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#tabstrip").kendoTabStrip({
contentUrls: ["html-content-snippet.html", "html-content-snippet.html"]
});
});