Actually, this is not true.

Android OEMs have to develop their own drivers to get the various components (screen, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G radio, accelerometer, etc.) working whereas with WP7, Microsoft will provide all the device drivers. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that Android devices have a much wider range of hardware options, so it's a lot more difficult to have an uniform set of drivers.

I have no idea how the Windows Phone 7 dev kit works, however with CE it literally was configuring some flags and resources, and that was it.

Microsoft did a tonne of heavy lifting to make it so. There were boxed in drivers for virtually everything, and customization was absolutely minimal.

And when you bought a MotoQ, it was stock CE.

All current Windows Phone 7 devices are restricted to the Qualcomm QSD8x50 platform, so there isn't much customization to be done as the hardware is nearly the same for every vendor.

As far as I understand it, Windows Phone 7's API is Silverlight with a few restrictions related to screen size and the like.

I haven't coded anything for Windows CE, but making a Silverlight app for Windows Phone 7 is about a difficult as making a WCF app for Windows, or an ASP.Net app for the web.

Why was this downvoted?

It confused the SDK for application developers with the hardware dev kit for OEMs, and was thus off-topic.