I don't know about the location thing, that seems a bit against the openness of Android, but qualifying a device/modification of Android to have access to the M

I don't know about the location thing, that seems a bit against the openness of Android, but qualifying a device/modification of Android to have access to the Marketplace is not. This isn't between the developer and Google, it's between OEMs and Google. Google doesn't want to hold the responsibility when OEMs make some modification to Android and their customers get a bad impression of a service because the OEM decided to make some incompatible change. Android devices and versions are already fragmented enough, and not having some kind of compliance built-in would be a downward spiral. In some cases, some OEMs and carriers have chosen to go with their own marketplace rather than use the Android Marketplace.