My girlfriend has an Android phone. Her reasons are threefold (in order of importance); 1) It's cheap. 2) It's relatively small (Wildfire S is smaller that the iPhone). 3) She uses only Google services (Gmail etc.) so it makes sense to use Android. She is what I believe to be a typical user and the fact that the OS is "open" is irrelevant to her. No-one else influenced her choice and I think this is true of the majority of the phone-buying public; the silent majority that actually matter (we "technically minded" [geeks and nerds!] really don't). Genuinely, the openness debate only has any relevance in places like this, and even then it's arguably not really relevant.

There are thousands of reasons to love or hate android. One thing i like is the development going on in Cyanogenmod and MIUI Android. It's relevant to me.

Those things wont help android 'win' against the iphone, but it will be relevant in other markets, like the MIUI phone, wasnt that around 200$?

The kind of open that they do is definitely less good than I would have hoped (I would love to be able to submit patches for the bugs I regularly encounter on my N1, say).

But trust me, of all the people I know who have android phones here in "Middle America" (off the top of my head without thinking too hard let's say more than 10), none of them bought them because of a techie brother in law raved about it being so cool because it was open. They all bought them because they wanted a smart phone and it was the one they were sold by the telco marketing. Period. (Okay, I'm up to more than twenty coming to mind just while thinking at the same time as typing, and still, none of them bought them because of the openness at all).

So yeah. While it's really marketing-speak to say that android is open in the sense that we all traditionally think of it, to google (and much more importantly to all the telco sales people) it means exactly squat as a selling point.

Which is why only people on HN (and Richard Stallman) get upset about it :)