Is there really a way to make OpenGL development simple and consistent across a wide range of GPUs and screens? It sounds to me like he's complaining more about how hard low-level cross-platform graphics programming is, not Android itself.
I developed a very simple app (BenPaper); it runs fine on 1.5, all the way up to 2.2. It handles things like device rotation without me writing any code to deal with that because all the layouts are liquid etc. etc. Admittedly it's a very simple app, but on the whole I was impressed with the defragmentedness of the platform.
Compare that to writing a J2ME app, where you have to use a build tool like Polish to build 18 different binaries, run 6 different emulators on your development machine, keep an up to date list of devices and their hardware characteristics...
In other words, no.
(Which is why it's funny that the author of the post points to .NET without mentioning Flash in his article)
The problem with this approach is that performance goes down the toilet (which is exactly what you see with Flash on mobile devices now). So what Google's doing is offering developers and device manufacturers a chance to write to the device itself through OpenGL.
Everything has disadvantages, openness included. The author seems to want it both ways (open platform with Apple like hardware consistency)