i agree with everything you say but there's one aspect that still has me scratching my head - that frigging plan at tmo for the $179 price - no matter how you slice it, whether you're an existing customer or a new to tmo customer, you have to take an additional plan for a single line at tmo to buy it at that price - and the math sez it's actually cheaper to buy it outright at $530 (if i were willing to pay that much) than to go with the subsidized price
at least buying it outright, if i allocated $50/month for cost, the outright price is paid off in 10 months - with the tmo plan, you're paying that $55 for 24 months (that assuming i took their plan, and then dropped data from one of my existing lines, so the $79 price is "adjusted" in my cost analysis to $55 ($79 minus the $25 i'm paying now)
i can't for the life of me figure why tmo would bother offering that plan except to support google, cause it sure isn't supporting tmobile
like you, if google had offered that phone, even at $399, i'd be on it - at $530, no way