What Pine has done is break the chicken/egg cycle of "there's no hardware -> there's no software"

I disagree with your assessment. There are plenty of competent programmers who are working on pushing forward this software, and even following from the outside I've watched massive improvements over time.

We needed (more) open hardware before the software could get properly started, and that's what Pine provided.

I don’t know how closely you’ve been following the progression of development, but every few months I get the itch to play around with my PinePhone and flash the latest version of one of the OSes. The experience is consistently greatly improved over the last time. I’m at the point now where the greatest usability issue I run into is performance, though I’m sure if I were to daily-drive I’d bump into more.

"I’m at the point now where the greatest usability issue I run into is performance"

As someone who has used the latest iOS and Android, I can't agree. The performance of the Pinephone is indeed really terrible, but the usability in general is also awful. There are just way too many little details that are missing, most Linux apps are still not really built for touch. It will be a while before all the important apps are fully ported over to Qt Quick and libhandy/libadwaita, but maybe by then they will have made a few more revisions with a better CPU. And of course I expect desktop users to start complaining when that happens because some apps will start to get more mobile-oriented...

>I would honestly not have the nerve to release a product with software in the state the Pinephone is in today.

To be fair, they're clearly marked as "Beta" on their store.

https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/?v=0446c16e2e6...

People are improving the SW constantly. And it does steadily get better ever since the release (and before, because A64 is older than the pinephone, and was also implemented in mainline Linux by someone other than the SoC vendor).