Certainly the new N7 isn't a "free" device in any meaningful sense. But Android as a whole remains vastly more open than iOS or Windows.
As with many questions of openness, it's a question of pragmatism. It might be fair if some Kickstarted device did this or something, but this is Google's flagship tablet. Google uses the "Open" moniker as a marketing tool to both sell the devices to like-minded supporters as well as to bash others (Apple, MS, etc) pretty much whenever they can, as do many of their affiliates/partners. As such, it's completely fair to hold them accountable when that ends up not being the case.
Yet I can go to www.cyanogenmod.com and pull and build a tree for the One and boot it, with access to the source code for virtually all of the system (sans things like the GPU blob in question).
That you would argue this is no more open than iOS or Windows is weird, and sounds more like a stand on vain principle and not "pragmatism".
Is it bad? Yes. Is it equally bad? Hell no.
A lot of the theory of optimization can be reduced to speeding up parts of code actually being executed and paging out parts of the code never actually touched, which works because the source is not uniformly useful. A kernel would be useless without a scheduler, a GUI program would be useless without an event loop, no matter how "open" the code surrounding those are.
Wasn't hard to find... :)
This is not about the apache or gnu license. This is not about binary blobs. This is about a huge company that is playing games with "open source" for strategic reasons, full stop.
Google could put in licensing conditions that would resolve this driver situation for any company that implements GED services, but they choose not to. It always comes back to the fact that their primary product is you the user, and they only are interested in selling advertising services. Google executives are behaving unethically with this platform.