Sez BusinessWeek: "[Elop] tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia's corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google's software. 'It just didn't feel right,' Elop says to the crowd [of Nokia engineers]. 'We'd be just another company distributing Android. That's not Nokia! We need to fight!'"
This is, at best, a half-truth --- Nokia would have the same freedom to tinker, reskin, and add their own apps as any other Android maker, which has so far been considerable. With Windows Phone, being able to reskin is a special favor, but with Android, it's part of the package.
What's believable here is that Nokia wanted _some_ kind of special favors from Google, and Google didn't want to play that game. Microsoft did. And it isn't clear from the outside what all those special favors were --- we'll have a clearer view, perhaps, when the first devices ship, though we still probably won't know the size of the "marketing payments" --- or how the other manufacturers will react, long-term, to being relegated to second-fiddle status on the platform.
Bizweek quote from here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...