Android OEMs should hear Microsoft, Nokia out on Google-Motorola combo (ars technica)

It has seemed to me in the past like Google has come out with their own phones whenever competition in the market has failed to produce hardware they feel is advancing quickly enough. Competition in the Android space drives improvements and lets Android compete better with other platforms. I think, actually, that if there's going to be any special relationship between the platform owner and the OEM, it will be to make the OEM easier to compete with, because Google benefits if other OEMs make better phones, because users have more capable devices for using Google's services.