It's also a battle that has already borne fruit. Texas Instruments has greatly increased openness and become very active in the Linux development for OMAP3. ST-NXP Wireless released the specs for the WiFi chips in the N800 and N810, which resulted in an open source WiFi driver. No, we're not there yet, but you can hardly accuse Nokia of neglecting this issue.
Idealism is all well and good, but this is the real world we live in where everything can't be black and white. Would you really rather there had been no tablets at all if the hardware hadn't been 100% open?