Except that that's not true. People are using it without going through a manufacturer. People got a hold of early releases of "Cupcake" and put it on their G1's before it was officially released by HTC or T-Mobile. People have been putting it on N810's without any manufacturer's support. People have been porting it to x86 and putting it on netbooks. XDA hackers have, IIRC, been porting it to other phones. Canonical is porting the runtime to run on top of Ubuntu (which could eventually run on Ubuntu-ARM, which then could be on Mer).