[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
I'm talking about security updates in that part you quoted, not manufacturers writing drivers. I could almost deal with not getting major OS updates, but the manufacturers don't even prioritize fairly prolific security updates. IMO, that is a bigger problem than the OS updates due to the way people use these devices and how much of our information is tied into them...

Device and component manufacturers are the best people to write the drivers because they are the people who design the drivers.

Do you seriously want Microsoft writing your ATI/NVidia graphics card drivers? The fact that they actual make those components pretty much ensures that they are the best qualified entity to write the device drivers for them. OS vendors typically make "Generic Drivers" (i.e. drivers that work decently, but are not optimized for your equipment), but those can be an issue in phones.

What if the Generic Drivers are causing your phone to get 20% less performance or 3 hours less battery life over a day than an OEM/Component Manufacturer-optimized driver?

Do you ever play games on Windows/Mac (even Linux, the few they have) without a Proprietary driver from ATI/NVidia/etc.? (Rhetorical qusetion).

The Manufacturers only have to support their own phones. Microsoft and Google don't write all the drivers so they don't need 1000 developers for Android or WP7.

The manufacturers only have to care about components that are in their phones. The issue is that these drivers (and software, in many cases) break across Android releases and it makes it very hard to release updates really fast.

Look how long it took Google to release Gingerbread for the Nexus One after the Nexus S, and they only have two freaking phones to worry about. Manufacturers have in some cases... dozens.

It's hard as ****. Linux is just a bad platform when it comes to driver compatibility across releases. Windows Mobile and even WP7 is much better from that standpoint.

Android was supposed to promise better ROI and less R&D costs for OEMs, but I'm wondering if they're even getting that? Or just benefitting from Google's (admittedly good) ecosystem and services...

Windows Mobile failed because the OS failed to properly transition from QWERTY/Stylus to capacitive touchscreen devices and the codebase was never repositioned to perform adequately on modern devices. The minimum specs were way too low for Windows Mobile, so it was primarily developed and tested on devices with almost Feature-phone specs. RIM is having the same issue with their BBOS, but they have a niche that will keep them alive. Miicrosoft dropped the ball by not agressively modifying exchange with more security and device management features...

Window Mobile was most useful for businesses who wanted to connect their users to Exchange without extra licensing fees, but iOS and Android have ActiveSync support and businesses that want security will use Blackberries over anything else. It simply didn't have a really good place, similar to Nokia. Symbian was bad and while it was decent for business use it wasn't as secure as BB and the OS/Ecosystem for consumers was markedly worse than iOS and Android.