It would really be nice to have a greater variety of hardware options available for those of us who don't want to be forced into Android or iOS here in the US and Canada. From what I understand, our lack of options is due to a variety of factors: business deals locking phones to a particular OS and/or carrier and locking down the bootloader, American phone models using CPUs that just can't have the OS changed, and most alternative OS'es and open hardware models/standards being primarily developed in Europe and therefore focusing on the European market over North America, as well as others. It means we're virtually stuck with the Google Pixel here, which is essentially paying Google to not have to use Google's OS, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm using one of the very few non-Pixel options with /e/OS, the Murena One, but it leads to another problem, the non-Pixel options having very limited options for carriers because most carriers don't know them so won't touch them.

Ah, right, forgot about it!

True. I use the keyboard add-on because of it.

Check just check the wiki: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/SHIFT_SHIFT6mq_(shift-axolotl) No one knows how future devices will perform.