Android has an NDK that allows you to write native code in C\C++. Most of the resource intensive code for Android games is native.

That's why you can't play most of the games if you have an android phone with a MIPS processor (they're all compiled for ARM).

What else should it be based on? Linux? At least Android has games, and they can also leverage 400 million users, and a platform growing at 1 million new users per month. Why does this matter? Because even if game devs are not interested to make games specifically for Ouya, they will make them for Android, and then it should be very easy to just port them to Ouya.