They tried that already with Bada and it didn't succeed. What will make this different?
And the phone you can afford is more likely to have Bada.
Android hit 200 million activations in November 2011. It hit over 500 million in September 2012.
Assuming the $15 fee was in effect when Android hit 200 million, then Google got roughly $4.5 billion in licensing fees in less than a year. Even Google (earning roughly $2.8 billion last quarter) would probably have trouble hiding that much pocket change in an earnings statement.
Now that you mention the number of activations, it's obvious Samsung is not paying that price.
However, if Google is discriminating between OEMs then that makes more sense. The typical terms (that, say, Samsung or HTC gets) might be quite generous, but the Indian OEMs don't get the same deal. I find it a bit surprising that Google couldn't come up with better terms for the huge but poor Indian market, but maybe there were non-export clauses or something similar that got in the way.
This combined with the fact that ICS was only released a little more than a year ago (half the term of most people's cell phone contracts) and Honeycomb was never officially put on to phones.
While some of those Gingerbread phones were in fact just "cheap phones" a lot of them were also high end (and everything in between) for the time they were sold.
Samsung didn't release a single new Bada Phone in 2012.
Windows Phone 7 had a horrible start in it's first calendar year for a plethora of reasons (at one point Windows Mobile 6.5 was still selling almost as much), but after Nokia started their development in earnest, sales have taken off (well, "taken off" relative to previous years)