To be fair (as a problem we have is that there is a small oligopoly of players and they all mostly suck), the original Android G1 was a locked down device: to get root on it required you to buy the Android ADP1 (which cost a lot more and had serious limitations with respect to apps from the Market); we only got root on it due to a bug (so the same as with iOS... it was just a dumber bug ;P). But yeah: Android wouldn't be usefully open source to anyone if you couldn't at least build your own device to test and run it on, and they clearly support that and they even provide emulators (and, thankfully, more recent, first-party Google devices are nice and open: Google learned their lesson there pretty quickly).