I don't think so with respect to the last sentence. I'm pretty sure it is just a failed attempt to make carriers irrelevant. I feel like Google has the same dre

I don't think so with respect to the last sentence. I'm pretty sure it is just a failed attempt to make carriers irrelevant. I feel like Google has the same dream Apple does, to make carriers an interchangeable commodity, but logically that doesn't make sense since a phone is only as good as the service it's tied to, and the expense of a top quality unit necessitates a 2 year contract. People, quite logically, choose their carrier and then their phone, and Google et al. can rage against that machine for years but it won't change. If they wanted to fire a warning shot, they would have made a deal with one of the major carriers and pushed the hell out of it, rather than selling it only to people who read Engadget.