At&t suffocating moto backflip

The motorola backflip was only announced very recently by At&t, and yet there are reported problems with it, due to a previously Open Project phone being made “Closed”. There were worries about Verizon doing this with their phones, however they did not. What some people are complaining about is that At&t are making this phone much less android-like. For instance, you can not remove the default At&t apps that come pre-installed on the phone, nor can you install non-market apps. Not only that but they removed Google search in replacement for Yahoo, on a Google Android device.  This is just so un-android, and there will be a lot more complaints I imagine. At&t’s response was:
We like the Android as an operating system on its own, but we want to make sure that we have, and customers have the option, to put applications on that device that are not just Google applications. And we want to give customers the choice of other applications on that device, not just the same Google applications.
Overall this is just a bad idea and I can think of no good that will come to At&t