Why do the carriers get anything?

What's Google getting for this? It's sad to see what a poor relationship Google has with carriers, in the sense that carriers walk all over them, while Apple has a completely opposite relationship with them, in the sense that they're forcing carriers to only buy the phone at full retail price, but also to pay them billions of dollars at a time pre-launch, by purchasing a set number of iPhones that Apple decides.

No wonder Google has usually been the last to implement stuff like VOIP and video-chat and SMS replacements and so on. They don't dare do anything without the carriers' approval, even though they have a much bigger market share worldwide.

On top of all of this, the carriers still get to put their crap on Android phones, too. So this is quite unbelievable. Google gave them so much power, when they really didn't have to, because Android was the only real alternative to the iPhone, especially in the early days when these deals were first made. It's the carriers that should've made concessions to Google, in order to get it, not the other way around.