This is exactly the Android opportunity HTC missed

Marco Arment: First of all, geeks are a very large and influential market. As one big example, if not for geeks, Firefox would never have started to catch on in 2004 and broken Internet Explorer’s reign. We installed Firefox on every non-geek’s computer we could find. And while we were there, we set everyone’s search engine to Google instead of Yahoo or MSN, and we made fun of their AOL email addresses until they switched to Gmail. Our preferences matter.

Marco is writing about the Apple App store, but the core point--that capturing the hearts and minds of geeks can lead market-share success--could equally apply to Android. If a manufacturer (HTC would be the most obvious choice) or maybe carrier (T-Mobile) had courted the vanilla-craving geek market from the outset, they could have established a Firefox-like "recommended by the leading geeks" reputation.