Is it time to Occupy Android?

Self proclaimed Apple fan here. Apple's App Store revenue is a drop in the bucket. I don't think that's the reason iOS5 is on the 3GS. iOS5 is on the 3GS because it's Apple's low end phone and still available for sale. It has to run iOS5 so folks can use their new software incentives to sell the phone itself (i.e. iCloud).

Agree with everything with one small nitpick:

"Leaked sales figures have it [Kindle Fire] outselling the iPad right now."

Not technically correct. The 'leaked sales figures' was a supposed internal screen shot showing 250k preorders over the first 5 days. What people did was use the same rate until Nov. 15th to extrapolate the mythical 2.5M preorders. Probably not going to happen.

The original iPad had 300k pre-orders to a market that didn't exist, and the iPad 2 wasn't available as a pre-order, but did sell close to 1M over the opening weekend.

I don't know about the internal structure of Apple vs. Android handset manifacturers, but from the outside, they seem to treat their respective OSes very differently. Apple treats iOS the same as Mac OS: It will run on any compatible device that meets the minimum requirements.

For Android handset makers, they treat Android as the firmware for the device they are making. When they start on the firmware, they take the version of Android that they want, write the HAL, and then add their special stuff plus any carrier related crap they've agreed to. Once you're not selling that device any more, why would you bother to update the firmware? Users (and maybe Google) want to Android to be like iOS, but the handset makers are treating it the same way they treated their old internal phone OSes.