Linux crowd expected this, Google by no means ever meant it was supposed to be anything beyond the Linux kernel with a Java userland.
It was launched without NDK, which only came later in Android 2.0 after pressure from game developers, and to work around Dalvik being a primitive VM, thus NDK has always explicitly listed NDK use cases and nothing else.
It is the rest of the community that built false hope that only because it uses the Linux kernel, the NDK should offer more than it does.
Even the Android IoT project that initially started withouth the Java userland with the target to use a C++ based alternative instead (Brillo) didn't last long, and the final version Android Things, even required writing the device drivers in Java.
By the way, Trello drivers are language agnostic, talk via Android IPC with the kernel, and some of them are indeed Java based.
It is a Linux distribution, it just turned out that "let me interrupt for a moment" meme was actually correct and what you wanted was a portable GNU distribution with an open kernel, and instead you got a Linux distribution with Google's user space and now instead of realizing the terminology was wrong from the get to you've misidentified the very trick Google played on us.
Turns out a kernel is just a kernel after all, and you really do want GNU+Linux, not just Linux.
I moved my wallet away from Google completely and went with Apple. If someone makes a serious OS that has the level of quality as iOS' apps for mobile I would consider getting their phones. I would be willing to pay extra on phones for the OS itself in order to fund its development, so long as its core is open source.
