It seems like the perfect opportunity for a hardware vendor to separate themselves from the crowd.
"Buy our hardware and be assured software updates for 2 years."
"Buy our hardware and be assured software updates for 2 years."
From my own experience with this, I bought a Samsung Moment a couple weeks after it launched and was abandoned with about 17 months left on my contract (with some severe bugs that were never resolved while I had it). I did get an official update to 2.1, but it was very late and that was the last update it ever received while I owned it.
Sure, I wasn't an eligible purchaser for their next immediate phone release, but their utterly terrible support of my product ensured that I'll never be a future customer of Samsung, for any of their product divisions and severely tarnished my impression of Android in general. All Android manufacturers do equally bad jobs at supporting their products with only a couple of products as exceptions (even "big release" phones like the original Motorola Droid got abandoned before their earliest contracts ended, late buyers are really screwed), so I'm not too keen on rolling the dice on any future Android products either.
It doesn't contain any new-ish phones, but for phones it does have on the list that were released less than 24 months ago (which would still be under contract right now), none of them will be getting updated to ICS via their manufacturer. The majority stopped receiving updates less than 12 months from their initial release.