Would somebody be able to explain in slightly less technical words what the issues are to doing something like this?
Long answer: the trend is for people to start thinking of cell-phone hardware just as a regular personal-computer, but with a different form factor. However, the architecture of the hardware is not yet standardized like the IBM-PC is/was.
Think of Android as being DOS. What we need now is to have more manufacturers developing devices that are "DOS compatible". That will mean that they are producing hardware and have the drivers for the system.
Once you get that critical mass, you'll see "distributions" of Android much like we see distributions of Linux. These distributions will contain a compilation of drivers for the most common hardware, and will load what's appropriate on boot time.