>Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel,

Until very recently, Google did not own the SoC, so it shouldn't be surprising that Apple is better at support given their vertical integration. At Apple, if the hardware isn't working as expected for a SW team, they send an email to a manager and it gets fixed or someone gets hammered by senior management. But the relationship between Google and a chip vendor isn't so smooth; that's just the nature of organizations.

Google has made a smart choice by trying to bite off the SoC and try to be more vertical. It will make support much easier for them in the long run.