I think the poster you replied to was also advocating a symmetric requirement that you could get the OS without hardware, i.e. take iOS and the Apple ecosystem with you to your favorite hardware vendor's phone.

Your point raises a third axis (services) but also illustrates to me how hopeless this all is in our current world. In my ideal world of consumer freedom, vendors would not be allowed to bundle hardware, software, nor services to prevent interoperation.

I despise all this subscription and rent seeking to try to turn every product into a locked-in service dependency. As an aging computer scientist and long-term developer of open and free software, I feel myself drifting further apart from a world that so willingly embraces an asymmetric and transactional existence with regular people locked into some amorphous, global company town.

> There's no world where phone makers stop customizing the software they ship

This is exactly what Pine64 is doing with their Pinephone. They probide no software at all, just hardware.