It's interesting where the complaint came from:
A lobbyist group called "FairSearch", made up of companies like Kayak, Expedia, TripAdvisor (and later, Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle), all of whom would rather that Google did not dominate their competing search spaces.
The basic claim seems to be that Google requires phone makers to use Google Services as the default apps if they want "the latest Android version". It's unclear if that means a version that hasn't been released to open source yet. Anyone know?
In any case, cannot a maker come up with a better web browser or GMail replacement, and let the user decide to set that as the default instead of Google's version? For that matter, does any maker really want to invest that much effort to replace Google Services in the first place? Or is this really only about Search dominance?