[recoiledsnake]

And then fall behind the curve as Google makes new builds available exclusively to partners? Fork it and risk another Meego/Maemo fiasco?

Without Google apps and Android Market, its hard to sell a phone. To make the requisite alternate software, it will take a year plus, all while parallelly developing hardware, might be a bit too much even for a huge company like Nokia especially seeing that they seem to lack software dev skills.