The actual weird thing is the PC market, which is pretty much the only place where a third-party software manufacturer is not treated as a subordinate supplier by the hardware manufacturer of the device the software runs on.

And it's mostly a side effect of the missteps that IBM made in the 1980s because they didn't understand the market dynamics, which is why they aren't in that market, commodity manufacturers are, and Microsoft was the big winner, not any of the hardware players.

Well, Google could have just pulled an Apple and don't licence Android for manufacturers that allowed this. Can't tout "bigger install base than Apple" with that, though.