Some questions (Embedded Challenges)

I wonder about the cooperation between Linux kernel development and mobile device developers.
How well do the OLPC and OpenMoko projects in this?  AFAIK it seems it was helpful that
pre-production OLPC machines were regularly made available to important developers, that OLPC
employed people known in the Linux area (at least Marcelo's name was familiar to me, and X11
people), and the close cooperation with Redhat / Fedora.  OpenMoko had the Neo1973 instead,
which probably got into the "right hands" too, and from the mailing list I somewhere saw they
do what they can to get their Linux patches merged upstream (... sometimes painfully).

Are there (already) lessons that e.g. Motorola and friends (traditional companies in contrast
to OLPC/OpenMoko) could learn from?  Are some of those lessons not applicable to them and why
not?