Its all to do with risk
This announcement has nothing to do with what consumers want, even if they are coincidentally aligned. This is about avoiding the finger of blame in the eventual outcome that someone's unpatched operator branded OS has a huge security hole in it that they have ignored despite Google releasing patches.
By pushing their handsets to be stock android, and not making any operator modifications, anything that goes wrong they can simply say "Not me guv" and point at HTC.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
