So your argument, in a nutshell, is "two wrongs do indeed make a right"?
What did Google do? They built their own unlocked phone following the open reference platform that they helped create. And now they are trying to sell that phone on the open market.
How is this wrong?
Other than that, I agree nobody has any justification for being pissed off by somebody cutting into "their" business by being more efficient.
The wrong is to mobile device manufacturers and networks, who were presumably led to believe that they would not be competing directly with Google itself. If they knew now what they knew then, they would have been much less likely to utilize Android. They feel misled.
When competing directly with your partners, it can sometimes be challenging to keep them as partners. But this is nothing new for Google.
They still must see some value in Android, or they wouldn't all be tripping over themselves to get the Nexus One.
Google has essentially done the same thing -- gone from being "platform" to being "competitor" -- and phone manufacturers are, unsurprisingly, just as unhappy about it as software developers usually are.
The question I'm getting at, then, is why in the software case we often denounce the OS vendors and go on about "sharecropping" and how terrible it is to get caught in this situation, but here we're joyously celebrating Google for doing what is, basically, the same thing (and remember that as much as you may dislike the company which provides your phone service, they are not the company which designs and manufactures your phone handset, so "they deserved it because I hate Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/etc." is misplaced here).
I'd argue that Google's in the right here, and that we ought to remember it when, as software developers, we complain about some big new competitor moving into our market. The end goal of business is to serve consumers. If some bigger business can serve consumers better, that's the why we have competition in a market economy. Either compete, or get out of the way and find something else to do.
The end goal of business is not to serve customers. It's to create more share holder value. If you can do that best by serving customers then so be it. If you can do it better by dirty tactics then don't think people will think twice about doing so.
Why do we have an economy? It's because ordinary people need goods and services. If we didn't, we could all stop working and stop buying things and live happily ever after. Most of us aren't shareholders in any significant way; if we actually believed that businesses existed to serve shareholders, let's get rid of them!
The reason company officers should act as if they're beholden to shareholder value is because there's no economic check on their resource consumption otherwise. It's easy to satisfy consumers: simply take lots of money from shareholders or the government, and give it to the people (a la AllAdvantage.com and several other dot-coms). But that's not economically efficient: there's no check on the resources consumed, so there's no incentive to be efficient, and you eventually run out of money. The profit motive ensures that businesses consume as little as possible and produce as much as possible, so as long as they act as if their goal is to maximize shareholder value, they maximize efficiency throughout the economy.
But over time, acting in the best interest of shareholders has been confused with the goal of the company is the best interest of shareholders. The former is an instrumental goal; the latter is an inherent one. And the inherent goal of corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, it's to provide useful goods and services as economically as possible. Google gets this; most other companies today do not.
Your theory, like communism, etc., sounds good on paper but I've never seen it work as described.
The problematic part is when you get that causation mixed up and argue that because CEOs are required by law to increase shareholder value, the government should help them, eg. by protecting them from competition. Because customers are best served by robust competition between businesses. Shareholder-value laws, antitrust laws, and intellectual property laws are all tools for this purpose. Just because CEOs should maximize shareholder value doesn't mean that government should pass laws that make it easier for them to maximize shareholder value, particularly if those laws are at the expense of consumers.
(And I realize that points have sorta become twisted around, such that it now seems like I'm arguing against myself up-thread. It's complicated. Basically, government should enforce level playing fields - it should make sure that products compete on their own merits, and not on the basis of their success in other fields. Cross-subsidization, like what Google does on a massive scale, is a tricky area. It's wrong if the company uses it to enter a market, dominate, and then jack up prices. But it's fine if the company uses it to enter a market, dominate, and then keep prices low.)
Theoretically, that levels the playing field. Microsoft often was accused of "cheating" in their product by using private APIs. Theoretically Google shouldn't be able to do this. I'd be interested in whether that's really the case.
I see a turf war between carriers (with Apple thrown in as a spoiler on one side) where the casualties are mostly innocent bystanders (us consumers). Google is sort of acting as a UN peacekeeping force, here. They might do some harm, as well, but their overall intent seems to be to knock some sense into the warring factions and make them stop treating consumers so badly. As with the UN, they are mostly powerless to fix the underlying issues, but they can at least set a good example of how to engage. I fear I might stretch the analogy a bit far if I go into any further depth or start mentioning war crimes, so I'll stop now.
But, I definitely do not see anything wrong with Google partnering closely with a handset maker (HTC) and producing a great phone with fair and open pricing and usable on most networks. I'm not sure what you believe is wrong with that...if there were some sort of contract or agreement in place to prevent Google from doing this, I'm sure the lawsuits would have already been announced. I'm, frankly, happy that Google has opted not to collude with telcos to keep the status quo (the way, say, Apple has done).