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Things have been changing - they put FPGAs in phones now:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S5+Teardown/2...

(search for "FPGA" in the page).

That's a tiny one, granted, but things are certainly getting better in that regard.

CPLDs have been pretty commonplace in complex embedded system designs for a while. They're great for consolidating a bunch of little logic bits into a single package, and allow you to build some control logic using code rather than iterating hardware when you need to make small changes. There's huge advantages for a system like a phone where you are extremely space-constrained, and also with quick turn engineering cycles where the hardware can't go through 6 revisions before being completed. Throw a CPLD or a low-power FPGA like the Lattice ICEstorm series in there and let the HDL do the rest!

I've also seen CPLDs used to recover from board layout mistakes.

That's cool to see, although given the exploding Samsung Galaxy phone situation (probably completely unrelated) I'm not sure their engineering of power consumption/cooling is the best thing to cite. :)

A defective battery is about as far as you can get from chip design.

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