Yeah, but what's it matter? Those people buy cheap Android phones. There are several options for up to date Android phones that are either Nexus, I mean, many of them if you're a GSM user. And many more if you want to use AOSP or CyanogenMod.

And devs get backporting of most apis via the Play Store so it's not like fragmentation is an issue very often at all.

The hardware is out there. The software is out there. You could port Firefox OS to the SGS4, you would have basically /everything/ on your checklist, and you can buy a 100% unlocked GSM SGS4 from Google and put Firefox OS, or port webOS, or whatever OS you want.

Are you simply lamenting that you can't walk into a store and buy that combo? I guess I don't care when I can follow the steps to do it myself (of course, now I'm starting to download stuff to play around with porting Firefox OS to my SGS4)

>requires a fundamental rethink of the entanglement between UI and API

Heh, I actually know of a platform that allows you to write web apps and from them invoke native code that conforms to their spec. And their vision is to have that platform spread across all device sizes. Do you know who it is? :)

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012/The...

Sadly, non-free. But yes, you can write projections for your own language. I've thought it would be cool to try to write one for Go.