No it isn't. The GP isn't saying people buy the phones for the crapware, the GP is saying that the carriers wouldn't have adopted it if they couldn't put their bloat on it.
While Apple was in a very strong position, the carriers had a strong interest in another player to counter Apple's market power. In the case of fragmentation, I think Google was just more willing to negotiate away things like this in the interest of getting a strong presence on the devices.
So you mean Google picked popularity over consistency and sold out to the OEMs and carriers for the sake of marketshare? Android is the pretty much the only OS where this is such a big problem, unlike Windows, OS X, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Windows Phone, iOS and probably even Linux.
I don't know where you get your information from, but Blackberry has broken compatibility in the last 3 OS releases, and Windows Phone 8 doesn't even run the same kernel as the previous version (breaks compatibility). I'm not sure if you ever touched Java ME back in the day... but yeah. You're just wrong on this one.
>Windows Phone 8 doesn't even run the same kernel as the previous version (breaks compatibility)
Windows Phone 7 apps run fine on WP8. Anyway breaking compatibility is a tad different from fragmentation. If your app runs on a WP7 phone, you can be reasonably certain it runs on all other WP7 phones. With Android, you can easily run into device specific bugs even though the version is the same and thus you're forced to test on the real hardware devices.
