I think what bothers people who feel this way (and I'm one of them) is that Google is taking things that Android used to include (like the browser) and moving all future development to closed-source versions, leaving the open-source version stagnant[0].

> Rather the author seems to be trying to redefine "operating system" to include things that have never been a part of such a term before, like online message routing and mapping services.

This doesn't really ring true in the face of what's happened; Google has kept a lot of things proprietary, sure, but they've also moved a lot of things proprietary that weren't before and abandoned the rest. They're making platform improvements in closed-source rather than open-source, making it difficult and impractical for a lot of developers to build apps that will work on Android, rather than 'Android plus Google Play services etc'.

This even includes the keyboard; Google has made improvements to the Android keyboard, but not in AOSP.

Fundamentally, this feels like an attempt to maintain both the user-visible branding (now everything is Google this and Google that, which reminds users that Google had its hand in things) but also to prevent carriers from shipping stock Android and cutting Google out of the loop.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...