Well, of course. But that's the point. Verizon can reskin it in exactly the way that CentOS does RHEL. And I have no problem with that. My interpretation was that mtgx thought this freedom (shared by me, Verizon, and whoever else wants to use it) was a bad thing ("the carriers should be powerless"), and I disagree.
That depends on whether or not they distribute it with any of Canonical's trademarks (I'm assuming they have a trademark on Ubuntu, not to mention their own name).
Trademarks are completely independent from (and compatible with) open-source - look at 10Gen, which preserves the rights to the MongoDB name while releasing a product under the GPL.