I saw some telecom analyst speculating that Google might want to shift off the IP they desire to a separate entity, license it back to Motorola where needed, and then try to sell off the actual manufacturing again.
I think they'll keep the hardware business - after all, it's rumoured that they went for Google rather than MS because the latter wasn't interested in the hardware business. And yes, this includes ALL telecommunication patents from Motorola (none of them were sold to Nokia-Siemens) which I'm pretty sure are worth at least somewhat more than Nortel's.
I think the only way they can not piss off their partners too much is to make sure that Motorola-branded phones don't get access to Android versions faster than anyone else. On the other hand, they can use the Motorola engineers to design Google-branded flagship devices instead of relying on HTC/Samsung/etc. as they previously did.
I wonder how this might also affect their plans for Chrome OS.
