I'm guessing Google got caught between a rock and a hard place here, with the qualcomm processor being the best choice (and the performance of the Nexus 7 is gr

I'm guessing Google got caught between a rock and a hard place here, with the qualcomm processor being the best choice (and the performance of the Nexus 7 is great), but being ridiculously locked down (you can easily extract binary blobs, so why restrict google from hosting them, they will be hosting them for the OTA updates anyway!). Should they have put out a worse device in order to stand up to this stuff though? Difficult choice. This is a pain - It's nice being able to download the factory images direct from Google for quickly restoring the device to stock or applying an update before the OTA is out, having to try to find them on XDA is annoying for a Nexus device. Kudos to JBQ for standing up to this, hopefully the fallout will cause something to change.