Seriously. I do.

Oh come on now. That's got _nothing_ to do with the way fixes are distributed. It's got everything to do with features of the kernel, drivers and some other software.

That Nokia uses a software update model ("push everything to a full future release, unless it's a fatal problem") is simply a choice of theirs, presumably because they're _used_ to that kind of model. Phones _are_ embedded devices.

There's nothing much different from Nokia's software and 3party software, except that Nokia's software tend to be closed. The 3party developers don't seem to have any problems whatsoever to follow a perfectly normal model (normal for desktop systems, that is) of providing fixes and updates all the time, not pushing to some future major release.