Not sure what's new here.. Play always came with strings attached. OEMs can choose Play or use AOSP and roll their own Play analogue like Meizu or Xiaomi or Amazon.
One of our apps rely on GPS, and the manufacturers that bought that app from us could only make it work after installing Play Services, and they could not figure a way to make it work without Play Services.
(Is there one?)
It is possible to have access to basic location data from a built-in GPS receiver in AOSP, so the system is not completely dependent on Google Play Services.
But access to e.g. Google's giant wifi-to-location database isn't part of that API. And it's a good service, and something that is hard to replicate and thus a competetive advantage.
But to speak to the upthread parent: it has nothing to do with "drivers". The HAL interface for GPS data is part of AOSP.
It's a service that Google will not let manufacturers replace even if they want to. Horribly anti-competetive. http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=14923
So if you want Google Play and everything else Google in your device, you have to take Google's location services, too. That may not be unreasonable.
It's Google's extra, proprietary services that are, well, proprietary. And that's hardly notable IMHO. There are lots of players in this space, it just happens that Google has done it better and is using that (among other features obviously) to drive sales of its "Play Services" product to OEMs.
Non-free software is non-free. If you care about that stuff, you wouldn't use it anyway.
Google aren't competing in the "Wifi to location" space on merit. They're competing on "we won't let you use our platform if you use a competitor in this space". They're becoming the 1990's Microsoft. This is exactly the shit people talk about when they say Android isn't open anymore.
Are you seriously arguing that that is somehow equivalent to Microsoft using their monopoly position in the market (something Google doesn't even have) force OEMs into bundling their own web browser (the single most important app of the past two decades)? No. Just no.
I'm sorry, but people who want wifi-to-location data in their Android apps or devices can get it. That's simply not anticompetetive in any sane use of the term.
Your last sentence, telling, pivots your argument pretty wildly from "anticompetetive" to "not open". And yes: if you want to complain about Play Services being proprietary software, non-open, non-collaborative and ultimately freedom-denying, I tend to agree. But the idea of this being somehow an antitrust issue is ridiculous.
Did the lawsuit finish?
B&N decided they wanted to "mainstream" their Android in terms of enabling it to be a "Google-logo" device. Probably a good choice if you haven't got the scale of Amazon's ecosystem.