A router shouldn't need to be "connected" in the Google OnHub sense of the word "connected" to get firmware updates. I have an ordinary Belkin wifi router that self-updates its own firmware automatically. You don't need the router to be connected to a managed account infrastructure for that, it just downloads the latest firmware from the web site and applies it.

Though I understand that such an approach has its own risks, it's not as bad as what happened to OnHub. According to this article, the Google OhHub outage was due to a bug in their back end account authorization engine, which failed the login authorization into the Google account, thus making the routers go down.

That's quite fucked up. I want my router to be a piece of standalone hardware which doesn't require authorization with a third party company to function.

There are other places where I'll accept that kind of thing. I buy a subscription to a cable-modem service provider, and so I expect that my cable router should have to authenticate with the cable company. I buy a service to Playstation Network to take advantage of their online cloud savegame file storage, so I expect to have to authenticate my playstation console with PSN. But wow, my Wifi router is *mine*, it shouldn't have to authenticate with Google in order to function.