Those kind of moves are petty but there are worst tricks they can pull unfortunately.
It seems Grapheneos is the rare actor willing to put up a fight nowadays, and their "partnership" with Motorola seems to be a first step. They need to ensure a hardware platform.
My guess is at some point they will have to fork AOSP, just because Google will take it in directions that go against Grapheneos principles.
I am still sad that Huawei didn't go this way, I thought they would with HarmonyOS.
I wonder if it could happen at some point that an alternative Android becomes so big that OEMs start supporting it. It feels like it may be interesting for the big Android manufacturers to support something like GrapheneOS?
I wonder: for those Motorola phones that will come with GrapheneOS, won't that make it cheaper for Motorola because they won't have to pay the Google licence (because those GrapheneOS-Motorola phone won't be Google-certified)?
I think this is the huge battle GrapheneOS won with Motorola. There are probably a few manufacturers of phones unhappy or nervous regarding Google.
The next battle is really on the app front. Once a country says our government and bank apps need to run on the fork of AOSP then you will start to have a real alternative to the Google/Apple (and now Huawei) duopoly.
My guess is there are a lot of candidate countries for breaking out of the American/Chinese grab on every smartphones.
So in a way the future could look bright as long as we support GrapheneOS and Motorola.
There's been no confirmation that any phones will come pre-installed with GrapheneOS from Motorola, just that some phones will be compatible.
My guess is Google is already applying pressure on Motorola to make sure every phone still ships with standard Android from the factory.