[ansible]

Along the same lines, Google wants to update shit I don't use and never will use (Gmail, Youtube, I don't know what all -9 apps recently)

Starting with ICS, you can uninstall the updates for those apps, and then disable them in the Settings -> Applications menu.

That said, Android works a lot better overall if you use Gmail at least.

As soon as someone figures out how to make it reliably easy to unlock phones and put another OS works with your phone company's system, the handset becomes a commodity

Oh how I wish this was possible. Unfortunately, at the hardware level, there is soooooo much support needed for each processor chip. Even among chips that share the same processor core (such as a ARM Cortex A9), all the peripherals and especially the power maagement is different. This prevents the building of a common hardware code base like we have in the PC world.