It's the same argument as with Microsoft vs. the EU regarding IE: Defaults are important when you have a monopoly.

I'm pretty sure that an important part of the Microsoft argument was that you couldn't uninstall ie and it was used by certain system functions even if you set a different default. That's an important distinction.

(Im a Googler, but that's not particularly relevant to this comment)

I can't uninstall Chrome on my LG Android phone either.

No, but you can fully disable it (and that's equivalent to uninstalling, and wasn't possible on windows).

That is certainly not the equivalent as it still occupies storage.

Also, you could actually uninstall IE. That only uninstalled the shell, not the libraries (as there were dependencies) but it was gone in terms of the application.

An "app" on Android is not a traditional executable. It's really a library and a collection of OS hooks that execute code from that library on various events.

The home screen icon is one of those hooks but by far not the only one. If I hide it or never press it, that implies exactly nothing about whether or not code from the app gets executed while I use the phone.