I personally see the lack of a Factory Image for a single device as being very minor. An overwhelming majority of Nexus users still choose to use stock Android and have no use for the source code. So what if there are a couple of devices missing from https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images , it's really not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, especially considering how rapidly Google is pushing out new devices.
Android is still open-source and the AOSP is still very alive and will live on.
> I personally see the lack of a Factory Image for a single device as being very minor.
It's not the lack of a factory image for a single device. It's the lack of a factory image for Google's flagship device when they've made so much hay about it in the mists of time (oh, about three months ago).
I'm not particularly sympathetic to most "open" argumentation when it comes to devices, but Google should walk their talk.
If Google insisted on shipping stock images it would have cost them. Either by picking an inferior chip, or by upsetting Qualcomm, or by Qualcomm charging them a higher price. Therefore they chose a position of some benefit to them when they decided not to ship stock images.
The best way to counter this benefit is a public shaming, so that in the end it's costlier than the other options would have been. But Google's not stupid; they wouldn't have made such an anti-openness move if they expected it to cost them.