The pessimistic analysts out there have a variety of complaints:

- Motorola is some 60% the size of Google, making the merger process a whole lot more work than inhaling a small startup.

- Motorola is losing money. Fixing that is going to mean more than just shoveling money at them and leaving them alone. Google's going to have to do a fair amount of rearrangement.

- How, exactly, is Google going to relate to other Android licensees. Will the Moto division get preferred access? If you're Samsung or HTC, you're looking at this deal as a serious pain point. Of course, Microsoft is in bed with Nokia, so you're facing the same sort issue with Win 7 Mobile. It's not like either Samsung or HTC or any of the others have the devs to truly fork Android and form a proper consortium of whatever sort to manage it.

- Or maybe Google just strip mines Moto for its patents and sells off a random-gear manufacturer.

On the flip side, I see lots of benefits:

- Moto could benefit from a Google-imposed coding discipline. Really, let Moto do the hardware and let Google do all the software, all the way down to the device drivers. That would be great. (See also, the end of MotoBlur.)

- Motorola also makes cable DVRs and AT&T U-verse boxes. Port Android/Google TV to those and you've now got something more interesting than the cruft that Moto is shipping now, and you could maybe even have a serious competitor for TiVo. Finally!

- Google, by controlling the whole stack, has that much more leverage when dealing with big telcos like Verizon that want to impose their own crap vision upon our phones. Google, like Apple, can tell them to buzz off, this is how it needs to be. Here's a patch. We want it out there, so we're pushing it now.