It's expected. The people who own the phones aren't in control of the OS and the wireless chipsets are closed/proprietary. Cellphones really shouldn't be trusted by anyone.
Correct, the baseband usually has binary blobs. Although I am curious why Google/Apple decided not to make their own baseband, given their new silicon manufacturing expertise.
IIRC Apple has tried/is trying, but it is ridiculously complex to the point that they had to go back to Qualcomm as there really is no other option. Read: The biggest tech co on the planet stumbles with this, it should be considered a magic box as this point.
Google is sort of trying by using a Samsung modem (instead of Qualcomm) with an IOMMU in between, so at least the modem doesn't have access to the whole address space like on other phones. But they get a lot of flack for it.
Right now we have no alternatives, but it's not technologically impossible to create mobile devices that give us root access to a mobile OS, or to create open wireless chipsets with open firmware.
