I don't know about the first one, but at Google IO they announced they were getting all of their partners (major carriers & hardware manufacturers) to agree to support any new device with software updates for 18 months. They hinted it would be required to be a Google certified device.

I hope so. It's kind of aggravating to be able to download and install the SDK in a few minutes but not to install the OS on either of the two phones or the tablet I have.

I wish more than anything they would try to stop manufacturer customization. I recently learned that the "dialer" app on my Motorola Atrix is not the default Android one, which might explain some of its really odd behaviors that just drive me insane. The home screen, even the browser is modified (at least the icon).

I like my non-default keyboard (I use Swype) and the HTC Sense phone dialer is much nicer than the default. And custom launchers can be pretty cool.

There's a difference between allowing customization by the user (good) and by the manufacturer/carrier (bad). Users will pick apps they like, by definition. Vendors will pick apps just to be different. That's sort of OK if the choice is really better (e.g. bundling Swype on my Epic). But they get it wrong more often than not.

Example: samsung wrote their own camera app. For reasons that are clear only to them, it refuses to work (literally, it pops up a message box and exits) if the battery charge is less than 15%. I'm sure they thought they were "conserving" battery (because clearly they know better than me how I want to spend my battery energy). But of course the real effect is that this is a $250 phone that won't take pictures in the evening. And this is routine in the market, Samsung is hardly the only offender. That's the disaster Google is hoping to avoid.

I'm unsure about the first one, but the second one is no way can be true. Diplomatic problems aside, it's technically impossible. Google don't write the drivers for those phones, manufacturers/carriers do, so how in hell can Google sneak in alone without drivers?

They could mandate an abstraction layer.