No it has nothing to do with Samsung. In ICE Google changed how the partitions are handled: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11714077&...
It was pure engineering tradeoff to improve things in the long term. If anything OEMs would have preferred the old 'just works', sub-optimal, gives-an-excuse-to-obsolete-a-phone, lower support issues, solution. The ball is now in operating systems' court to support this standard in a way it wasn't envisioned to work a few years ago.
Even ubuntu has been slow on this front.
Re:What killed the Linux desktop
by raverbashing on Thursday August 30, 2012 @03:02AM
(#4453400)
Nice explanation, if it's to facilitate upgrades I'm all for it!
This is 100% to blame on Samsung, sorry.
Even though my Samsung phone is seen as a USB device (and it works on MAC OS X), but maybe in the newer models they removed this functionality (and called it a feature)
People may complain that iPhones need iTunes but then again it's iTunes not the gigantic pile of crap that is Kies