>I'm not talking strictly hardware, though you may be talking strictly software. That may be where the disagreement is stemming from. The point of the article is about the locked bootloader restricting access to the hardware.
The thing you're overlooking is that it's possible to run Android on hardware without these conditions. If you want a completely unlocked phone, there's the Nexus series in the mainstream and there are other devices that are relatively open on the hardware side as well.
The point is, you had the option of running Android on any hardware you liked. With WebOS, you had no option but Palm. That's the very definition of vendor lock-in.
Nobody particularly cared about being able to install Debian on the Pre, because Debian will run on any hardware you throw at it because Debian is open software and can be made to run on anything you want it to. It doesn't matter that locked down devices exist as long as open ones do, because the software will run on any device.
This is something that Android can do that WebOS couldn't.
ETA:
I think the tl;dr of this would be "Hardware is a commodity; software isn't."
