There's a very small number of people who find this to be very important, and my experience has been that the strategy is to loudly complain whenever anything depends on play services. Just tactically speaking, I don't think this is going to work in the end, in the same sense that simply refusing to have a mobile phone won't work anymore -- slowly, the circumstances around this technology will make it impossible to refuse.
What I don't understand is why nobody just writes an API-compatible open source implementation of play services. Even if it only supported GCM and nothing else, that'd unlock an enormous swath of apps, and would only require writing a basic implementation of the GCM network protocol.
I'd love to know more if I'm misunderstanding the challenges around doing that. Right now it's part of the reason that I don't pay much attention to that crowd -- everyone seems very willing to complain, but nobody seems willing to do what seems like pretty straightforward work to solve their own problem.