This sounds like all the more reason to decouple the carriers, hardware manufacturers, and the OS.
You can't decouple hardware SDKs/APIs, but there's no good reason why the OS can't be. Sure, some math issues for some chips, but still, those aren't that hard to work around with things like conditional compilation. (I've got a math issue on a couple of my devices in some cases - Raspberry Pis.)
Actually, it would be cool to see a hardware add-on to turn a Raspberry Pi into a smart phone!