I wanted a big-screen phone that I could run my own apps on and put them on the web for other people to download (without needing to buy a mac to develop on, or pay apple for a developer certificate). Something to replace my PDA (an ASUS A730W running windows mobile 2003 - still quite a nice device but my phone now does everything it did). The Google integration made very little difference to the appeal; I might well have gone for a windows phone if they hadn't been in a process of multiple incompatible OS rewrites, or one of the Nokia Linux phones if they hadn't been a total mess. For me at least, Android was just in the right place at the right time.