Google knows all this. I figured they're keeping the skeleton of a flagship, branding, marketing, and distribution as a countervailing threat to oems like Samsu

Google knows all this. I figured they're keeping the skeleton of a flagship, branding, marketing, and distribution as a countervailing threat to oems like Samsung that have played around with Tizen or thinking of going too propietary. If an OEM decides to drop play services or the play store then all google has to do is dump some money into their pixel org to make things move a little bigger and faster. Plus it helps to have a flagship when you're developing new Android features. Telephony features and dual sim was supported by pixels first, at least in a non hacky way