There's a pretty good interview at Gizmodo today with Rick Osterloh, SVP of Product at Motorola Mobility.
The entire interview is, again, at Gizmodo. It's definitely worth a read.
GIZ: In terms of the way you adapt the OS to your own phones, it's certainly a lot closer to stock Android than we see from most manufactures. What's the thinking behind that?
RO: Well, there are several things. So first off we think Android's evolved to a great place, a great user experience. And we just believe that it's a better user experience to go to the core essence of Android, and give that to the user. It also has some enormous benefits, like what users have just seen, which is that we can upgrade our phones to the latest version of Android much faster. And that's a core part of our strategy: We want to make sure that users get fast upgrades. And so we were the first to offer a KitKat upgrade on our phones through a carrier, and we did that through Verizon on the MotoX, which was, we thought, pretty cool for our end users. And we're gonna keep doing that, keep pursuing that strategy.
It's also the case that you see our phones have sort of outsized performance with the core specifications. User experience is really fast, you get great battery life out of these, and that's frankly because we're not introducing layers of software that we don't think are necessary, like our competitors are. So that's why we're pursuing this strategy. We add things where we think it can enhance the Google experience, like Touchless Control & Active Display, and in other places we try to stick to the core tenets of Android.
The entire interview is, again, at Gizmodo. It's definitely worth a read.