Yes, articles like this illustrate that RMS had a point, as annoying as he can be about it. Android is obviously Linux. What's missing is all of the things GNU and BSD brought to the party.
Try reading Linux man pages on things like system calls to map shared memory. On Android it won't work, and you have to call into Java code to do it. Google created a monster rather than work to get things merged into the kernel (there was some kind of possible resource leak or DoS with shared memory mapping).