That is why I put "free" in quotations. Furthermore, many devices sold do allow you to at least put open source equivalents on them on these devices; many flagship phones allow this with some know-how. On the scale of freedom from 0 to 10 (0 being a Lumia, 10 being the computer that RMS uses), I'd say most Android devices are a 3, with many devices being able to go up to a 6 and some devices going up to an 8 with Replicant.

Nonetheless, people fail to recognize the freedoms that Android does give you, and only criticize the freedoms that it doesn't give - the reasons why it's not a 10. If not for Android, I'd wager we would not be able to go beyond 2 (≈ iOS) on the freedom scale when buying mobile phones. That would be bad, and it seems zealots fail to recognize this (that's probably why they are zealots in the first place).