> Google has been steadily moving things into play services though, which is not open.

This is a good thing, they've been de-googling the base OS and making it as stripped down and bare-bones as possible.

This is a huge win for security, privacy, and freedom in general, and exactly what they should be doing. Android should be a small, secure Linux based operating system with an API that makes it easy to build services on top of it. The Google ecosystem should be completely decoupled from the OS.