That's the logic that brought us ads plastered all across the web, with nothing sanctified, including the _content_ of the web page. 'I mean, we _already_ see them anyway, what's the difference if they're blinking/videos/popups? I mean, we don't have to look.'
And yes, I pretty much use my mobile as less as I can, just for these reasons. I'd never use it willingly as long as there's even a trace of google in android. However, can you elaborate more on the coprocessor? Maybe some additional reading? I'm very interested in what possible surveillance do they have in the hardware itself.
P.S - At this point, I'd rather use apple than google. At least apple can't tie my activities to my search results, which is an insanity that the world will come to terms with several years down the road, and then repent.
Are you torrenting, or planning terrorist acts, or whatever else, on your mobile connection? You're crazy. I would never do anything I'd want to hide from the government on my phone; it's already got that mysterious baseband coprocessor running god-knows-what with direct DMA access to main memory. Adding a VPN pipe directly to the manufacturer doesn't make me any more potentially-spied-on than I already was, since the ISP already, effectively, had arbitrary code execution and their own backchannel.
Security professionals don't avoid smartphones altogether, of course; they just use them only as conveniences for "unclassified" day-to-day operations.