What I want to say is that we have a far way to go yet to further the cause of Free Software in hardware and embedded systems, so we have to start somewhere. Educating/counseling/encouraging manufacturers ready to make the transition and making gadgets available to developers are, to my mind, good ways to start.
It is a terrible way to start, one does not distrubute and promote non-free software in the hope that someone might write a free replacement. This is no different that say Ubuntu packaging Nvidious binary blobs, in the hope that someday there will be a free driver.
All this raffle kerfuffle! I mean, will anyone confuse a raffle with formal certification of a device?
Clearly people have done so, me included.