This is better than nothing, and I suppose it's far too late to do anything else, but I was really hoping they'd force manufacturers to provide updates and unify the platform a little.

If you have to test on all the devices and make individual builds for different devices, development sucks. I was at Loopt when we supported J2ME, where every phone that was supposed to be the same[1] was different, and per-device builds were the only solution. It was a nightmare. In the long term, I fear Android won't be much better in that regard.

[1] Java runs the same everywhere! All the JREs are validated by Sun and pass the same tests!