> FLOSS phone ecosystem will be hard to next to impossible, in my opinion, but worth going into

You can run Android without gapps fairly well, I believe there's even a project that replaces gapps and uses xposed to fake signatures so that they look legitimate to replace Google Maps and other in-app widgets frequently used on Android. Or you can run with GApps if you're willing to tolerate some level of proprietary software.

FLOSS on phones is actually in a quite good state, F-Droid is pretty good, many well maintained open source roms. Better than most other platforms.