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The argument would be that this suggests that Google's garden should have higher and better-guarded walls to prevent such things, while many seem to argue that our gardens' walls are too high. Apple gets criticized for having slower and more arbitrary manual reviews of all app updates, but they don't seem to get malicious apps like this in their app store nearly as much.

They also don't have decent free mail clients with OpenPGP support.

Not really. This is only news because it's surprising and uncommon. In contrast, consider the fake Microsoft tech support scams. Those are so common that Microsoft gets 10,000 complaints/month [1], so nobody would think to mention a single example here.

[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/05/18/fight-t...

It’s not uncommon at all, and it’s been documented here and other places many many times. The difference between this and your poor analogy is that here Google could actually prevent this if they chose to.

It's hardly a walled garden. More like a picket fence.