It essentially boils down to we don't have control over what software can run on these devices, so the extent to which we can harness the hardware is limited to what the OS vendors decide, and they make lots of terrible decisions.

I think they're grousing that we can't sideload arbitrary apps onto our phones. There are a couple of reasonable defensible view on the matter, neither of which are relevant to the subject at hand, and I'm not sure why they brought it up.