What's really frustrating is that a clear open source strategy would just plain fix this with no cost to Google or the carriers at all. The Nexus phones (and a handful of others) get Cyanogenmod updates with new features all the time.
But almost no one wants to ship a phone that the community can modify. And even Google treats CM like crap: they get no visibility into the process, so have to scramble to synchronize with each major release needlessly.
They do not[1] treat all their vendors the same way. It has been documented that Google provides early access to particular vendors, in order to suit their own desires for the launch of each version of Android. It has been going on at least since the original Droid launch on Verizon.
I guess it depends on what you mean by 'launch'. There was an ICS image released like a month ago, and a friend was running a CyanogenMod 9 alpha build shortly after.
That's confusing two issues. You're talking about a corporation "blessing" the use of some software on some device. I'm talking about people actually doing the work to make the software work on the device.
We currently lack the latter because the former is perceived as "expensive" by the companies who need to provide the support. That equation changes rapidly if the product starts out as a blessed version of an active community project.
But almost no one wants to ship a phone that the community can modify. And even Google treats CM like crap: they get no visibility into the process, so have to scramble to synchronize with each major release needlessly.