Supporting a wider variety of hardware does not necessarily lead to commanding a larger market share. Who's to say a smaller number of devices that Google (or the device makers) were able to spend more time on supporting and polishing wouldn't sell more units than the broad array of phones we see? It would certainly lower the barrier to creating great apps on the platform, which would encourage wider adoption.

It seems silly to me to say blankly that "Choice is good." Obviously there are upper limits on how true that can be. If Motorola were designing and shipping and selling thirty different android phones right now, that choice would not be good. The phones would suffer and customers wouldn't know where to begin thinking about which phone they wanted.

The hassles for a developer associated with testing and making apps compatible on such a wide variety of devices are not trivial. It's a tradeoff, and Google is making no effort to control how that tradeoff breaks. Microsoft is taking a different approach. We'll see how that plays into things.