Commercial distribution is never an issue with Free Software as long as you follow the license you are free to sell products using them. Of course you can't just sell the raw software but you can sell a service to code it up(spread over multiple sales) or devices that run it.

Anyway I'm a strong believer of the Free Software ideology(and yes as any religion or other ideology there are things that are dogmatic to it). But I myslef draw the line at firmware usually. Firmware is only the stuff that would be baked into the ROM if companies weren't using EEPROMs(not that sometimes I wish they were using plain ROM and actually get the hardware 100% working BEFORE throwing it out to the market).

I do believe drivers should all be Free(commercially and intellectually) though I could accept firmware blobs. The reason for this is so that a user is free to update to whatever kernel they may wish as long as the driver can be recompiled for it. Thus it could use the same firmware just an updated driver in-between.

I believe that the core functionality stack should be Free Software as well. This means the middle layer with the access, apis etc. So yes lower level(kernel space), middle layer(userspace with the core functionality stack, UI toolkit(s)) should both be Free Software. For the highest layer the stuff that users see I would prefer to have it Free Software but since that could, if both lower layers are Free, be easily replaced I would have less of a problem.

I can respect companies trying to make a buck, I can respect them having trade secrets that they wish to keep closed, I can't accept having user freedom lacking due to that though.

Whatever happened to the old old adage: The customer is always right?

As for radios, 3d acceleration, location services, battery charging from some other post.

Radios should be locked down in the firmware not software. This is the simple idea that it'll be harder to bypass a firmware restriction than a software one(yes reverse engineering can happen)(even though both are technicall software).

3D acceleration - there is absolutely no sane reason for this to be locked down. Atleast the core GLES functionality should be accelerated and Free. Any additional out of spec accelerations could be written based on specs.

Location services - I can respect they are investing heavily into this, and want to keep it closed, but this should be replaceable in such a way that another component could be used. What if I want to use Google's location services integrated into the system? Or my own even? The API atleast should be made available for this so that others can replace that component.

Battery charging - or let's say power management, they consider this to be a distinguishing feature. Why not provide an open core for charging and basic power management Freely then build on top what they consider as distinguishing features? That way if someone doesn't wish to run that particular piece of software they would simply loose the benefit of their distinguishing features. But could have their own.

Well this is started to turn into rambling. /me goes away for a while