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Just ran across this in "the Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development"
A Guaranteed Market
"As mentioned in the introduction to the chapter, Android is open source. Specifically, it is mostly available under the Apache Software License 2.0. This license places few restrictions on device manufacturers. Therefore, it is very possible for a device manufacturer to create a device that, frankly, does not run Android very well. It might work fine for standard applications shipped on the device but do a poor job of handling third-party applications, like the ones you might write.
To help address this, Google has some applications, such as the Android Market, that it has not released as open source. While these applications are available to device manufacturers, the devices that run the Android Market are tested first, to help ensure that a user's experience with the device will be reasonable.
A Google engineer cited one case where a device manufacturer was readying a phone that had a QVGA screen, before the release of Android 1.6 where QVGA support was officially added to the platform. While that manufacturer had arranged for the built-in applications to work acceptably on the smaller-resolution screen, third party applications were a mess. Google apparently declined to provide the Android Market to the manufacturer for this device.
Hence, the existence of the Android Market on a device, beyond providing a distribution means for your applications, also serves as a bit of a "seal of approval" that the device should support well-written third-party applications."
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