Jolla has added new stretch goals for their pretty cool tablet on Indiegogo. They have already met their funding goal by a long shot. Jolla has already made and shipped a Phone. In Europe their phone actually outsold the Iphone. Jolla was started by the the team who created Meego at Nokia. This is a the real deal it runs Sailfish Linux using QT and RPM package manager. It runs full Android apps and more native apps are coming daily. The OS is community based and they do not retain your data.
They say: Making each of these features has a cost, some of them very significant cost. We need large volumes to be able to make all the features and upgrades, and also want to hear if these are the features you want and see valuable. In particular the cellular connectivity has demanding certification and field testing requirements.
They don't retain data just like Opensuse or any other Linux distro doesn't retain your data. The carrier, well they can't do anything about that.
The model can install RPM pakages and android apps. And Sailfish is much faster than Android. I run both on my Nexus 5.
What is wrong with people powered? Linux, which Sailfish is part of is people powered. Linux is is a huge industry worth Billions so apparently it works.
Sailfish OS supports installation of RPM and APK files. Why use a ROM that isn't based off of Sailfish? In terms of potential, Android is obselete in comparison.
Linux is people powered. Let's say somehow Jolla messes up a Sailfish release, it's open, so what's preventing you and the community from developing a fix? As for government loopholes, if there are any, it would have to be running as root, and as such could easily be traced to the package thus you could uninstall said software. If it were on the kernel level, recompiling the kernel isn't rocket science.