I feel the reality is that Android is open when you look at gerrit, Cyanogenmod, and the Apache license.
The closed view is the inability to view the source of what is on the devices that people buy, view the in-process development work by the major contributors, and the bootloaders on all of the popular devices.
Android as a side-by-side simple competitor to the iPhone is dead because it is so much bigger now than what can fit on a single Cupertino conference table, and that's awesome.
Add to this picture the fact that there are hundreds of millions of devices, every iPhone/iPod touch is 3.5" at an aspect ratio of 3:2 and every iPad is 9.7" at 4:3.