The Android flavor of Java, the Dalvik VM as I understand is fully free. I thought at least all of what constitutes J2SE is too these days.

Still, seems to me like the non-free parts of Android are similar to Maemo's, there's probably a bit less of them but that is a little hard to tell because 1) there are many Android devices and what is closed is likely to vary between them 2) the Maemo wiki documentation doesn't really seem to be up to date on this issue.

I listened to the podcast and their main argument for choosing Android as their platform seemed to be that they are more convinced it will be around for a long time to come than they are with Maemo's continuing existence. Another thing they seemed to be saying was that there is so much work to be done in maemo userspace apps that devs have no time or interest to concentrate on making the low-level stuff free (not sure that is a very sensible argument but there you have it).

They admitted that there is more free software in the applications for Maemo but think that it's a non-issue and the low-level things like kernel modules and libraries are what is the hard stuff to get free. Another issue with Android they mentioned was that the App store is not usable at all with an unofficial firmware, "it's a bit like Debian without apt-get". I think they underestimate the effect having Google be a bit uncooperative can have on the platform.