So this is a small part of the market and a very crowded one, with the mainstream phone manufacturers Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola plus Blackberry, HP, Palm, HTC and of course Apple as major competitors.

NB Please excuse the Radiohead reference in the title - someone had to post it so I may as well be the first.

What makes you or anyone else think Google won't do their best to lock people into using Google as much as absolutely possible while still promoting it as anything else but? They're a large for-profit company, and despite their claim of "do no evil" they'll do their best to monetize everything that isn't part of their philanthropic arm, because, once again, that's what they are, and that's exactly what their shareholders (which probably most of the employees also are) demand from them. This is the nature of the beast of any entity that does things for profit, we all might as well accept it and get used to it, if we weren't already.