At the very least I hope they require some sort of cross-compatibility from manufacturers, which Google never did, and just let manufacturers do whatever they wanted with it. Also no one should be able to modify it but Mozilla. I'm a big fan of Android, but I feel Google could've taken a different direction early on, and it would've still worked out for them, considering there was no real alternative to the iPhone in the first 3 years.
That's not how the market works. Every large phone manufacturer already had big investments in would-be iOS competitors, such as Symbian or Bada or Maemo/MeeGo or WinMo. These companies are also big enough to not see the impeding danger of their conservative investments until it is too late.
The iPhone wasn't considered a real threat (remember how Ballmer laughed at the iPhone?). If the requirements for Android would have been restrictive enough for manufacturers to realize that Android is a great deal, I don't think it would have caught on so well and Microsoft could have eaten their launch, since they are better at selling operating systems.
