I thought I saw somewhere that the Motorola Axis/Avis (I forget the correct name. found it Atrix) is getting Gingerbread or there is a download for it already.

I was also thinking that if you root the phone, maybe that would be a way to update Android whenever you want. But I am sure that the phone manufacturers might tightly integrate the Android OS on it so that you have to go through them to upgrade.

Unfortunately, this is very similar to what happened with J2ME and manufacturers. In which they would implement the specification correctly, but since Sun wanted all those j2ME phones out there, they still certified the phones on apis, even if they weren't 100% compliant.

Thanks for all your replies, I really appreciate the help.

Mark