No it has nothing to do with Samsung. In ICE Google changed how the partitions are handled: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11714077&...

It was pure engineering tradeoff to improve things in the long term. If anything OEMs would have preferred the old 'just works', sub-optimal, gives-an-excuse-to-obsolete-a-phone, lower support issues, solution. The ball is now in operating systems' court to support this standard in a way it wasn't envisioned to work a few years ago.

Even ubuntu has been slow on this front.