Torvalds must be on drugs or also trolling hard to be talking about an absence of carrier lock-in and Android in the same sentence - an OS rendered practically unusable should you elect not to associate your device with a Google account, and all that such entails.
Cell-phone carriers have formed an oligopoly due to the extremely high cost of building nationwide service and the limited amount of mobile spectrum. This will naturally lead to a situation where the industry can stagnate and overcharge with there being very little pressure from new entrants to the market that try to exploit the market failure. Carrier-lockin makes this problem even worse because they make it even more expensive to use their services unless you lock yourself in longterm in exchange for a phone subsidy that amounts to a discount.
Sure, there are lots of concerns about Google having lots of information about you. But at least you have choices, and at least you don't have to pay Google $100/month and pay them more if you want to leave.
What? It's perfectly feasible to have an Android phone and never sign up for a Google account. There are third party app stores (Amazon, GetJar, etc). If you don't feel like using a third party app store you can just install apks directly from the web.
Your device becomes unsellable without the Google lock in. Lots of companies tried it early on in the Android ecosystem. Even those who hit great price points, provided a vanilla Android experience and provided their own app stores failed miserably.
It's just naiive to think you can be successful without Google.
Supporting Google access and requiring it are two very different things. Of course a phone that wasn't capable of integrating with gmail etc would never sell but that doesn't mean that I can't personally opt out if I buy that phone.
In what way is an Android device "rendered practically unusable" when not associated with a Google account? Having run an Android tablet without one for a while, it was pretty much exactly as usable as with a Google account.
If you're in the US, the Nexus 4 doesn't support CDMA, which rules out Sprint and Verizon. AT&T doesn't give a discount for bringing your own phone, so you'd be losing money if you don't take a device for them but buy a data plan. So you're effectively locked into Tmobile.
Postpaid plans are the problem here. They're something of a tax upon people who can't do math if you have a subsidized phone; they're terrible if you bring your own phone.
If you bring your own phone, you want to be looking at the prepaid arrangements. AT&T has considerably cheaper prepaid plans than their postpaid plans (I think it was like $40 cheaper when I looked?). T-Mobile's prepaid plans are even cheaper; I pay $30/month for 100 voice minutes ($0.10/minute overage, which I've hit a couple times), unlimited data (speed-throttled at 5GB), and unlimited texts.
I paid $350 for my Galaxy Nexus and ditched my $90/month AT&T postpaid plan for the $30/month T-Mobile prepaid plan, and the delta in plan costs paid off the cost of the phone (over a carrier subsidy) in about four months.
T-mobile's postpaid "value" plans can also be a good deal (no phone subsidy, but yes contract/ETF). We just moved from the prepaid $30/month/line plan to a family value plan, because we could get 5 lines for <$20/month/line (unlimited talk/text on all lines, 200mb data on two lines).
AT&T doesn't give me a discount for bringing my own phone and Sprint/Verizon went with CDMA instead of GSM, thus the phone is carrier locked in to T-Mobile. I don't know what to make of this. May be magic should've been real - we would get a truly unlocked phone that can be used for free at highest speeds on any network in any part of the world :)
There are pre-paid providers which operate on AT&T networks and offer services (including upto 5GB data) for about $50. If you are not on a family plan, buying an unlocked phone and going pre-paid is actually cheaper.
