Hardware makers today (HTC, Motorola and the rest) will most definitely go all in with Google because there's no other choice if they want to compete with Apple! I'm sure they're all well aware that they won't be able to differentiate themselves and they their margins will be razor thin, but even razor thin margins are better than no margins.
Is it really the case that Android is the only option at this point for hardware makers who are not Apple? That seems silly to me. The other choice is to compete with Apple by building the whole stack. My worry is that Palm's apparent failure is going to put the rest of the industry off of the idea. It doesn't seem ridiculous to me for a company like HTC or Motorola to either buy Palm or start from scratch on their own OS so that they actually have something to sell their product with instead of just selling yet another android touchscreen device. Is that not an option?
Ex: Even if the same app doesn't run on two different OS's, they can both still talk to twitter. Back in the day, if you both didn't have a copy of Word, (and floppy drives) you couldn't share data.
Also, re: why would anyone want to do this, my answer to that is that if they have something different from everyone else who is competing on who can sell the cheapest Android phone, they would have something to sell.
Maybe the smarter play is to produce high quality, good value Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile phones that address the market.
1. Is this really what the hardware makers want? They all have seen history as well, and if they go all in with Google the way that HP and Dell did with Microsoft, it leaves the them with precious little to differentiate themselves by. This is why the PC makers have all mostly ended up in a race to the lowest price with razor thin margins. Don't you think a company like HTC would rather be in Apple's position today with the Mac than in Dell's position with their PC's? * A partial answer to this question is that Palm did try, and seems to have failed (which is confusing to me because they seemed to be doing exciting things and had people who really liked their phones) so maybe the HTC's and Motorola's of the world think they have little choice in the matter
2. What does having a third major player in the room do to negotiations (OS + Hardware + Carrier)
One incident that ties these two questions together is how Motorola got screwed over the Droid. They invested a lot in making a decent smartphone running Android but since Verizon owns the name of the product, Motorola gets bumpkis from the product's success. People who bought a Droid may go out and buy a Droid 2 but they will be getting a phone from HTC not Motorola.
A post script question I have is how customers will react to the Dell-and-HP-ification of phones. With computers, there was never really an expectation of how fast and smoothly they could get things done. If Android phone makers end up in a price cutting war, they had better make sure the base model they are selling works better than some off the rack LG flip phone. People won't put up with phones that don't work, their experience is with phones that do.