This is not the case. I have a Samsung Moment "with Google". The stock Android it ships with comes with unremovable apps (and unremovable game demos), a half-baked navigation app, a terrible voice search replacement, unkillable background services that count how many times you open the keyboard. It's also got a totally broken radio driver that violated FCC 911 regulations for over a year (google it if you care), and has been abandoned at 2.1 officially 10 months from release since it's no longer in Samsung's profit interests to maintain a terrible device that Sprint pulled from their product line. The only way the phone is remotely enjoyable is with custom ROMs. I bought it with 1.5 and accepted a sub-par experience because of Samsung's publicly stated promise that it would get 2.1 quickly, it took several months before an official 2.1 update was released and nearly another year before their radio issues were resolved.
The "with Google" branding meaning nothing in terms of actual phone experience, and Samsung isn't the only vendor at fault here. After my experience, and dozens of similar accounts like this blog post, I don't recommend anyone buy an Android phone that isn't a "by Google", like the Nexus line, and even then, only if they have some strong objection to getting the iPhone, which I would recommend over any current Android device.
I really, really, really wanted to like Android, but you can damn-near put an 18 month countdown on the majority of the Android phones before the manufacturer abandons it and you're stuck using XDA developers or the like for updates, patches and improvements, or just to fix the stock crap they ship. On a 24 month contract cycle, that's just unacceptable.