There's a lot of software on a modern phone. For at least a decade, all the major mobile phone manufacturers have been large software companies.

I don't see what would have changed significantly at Motorola: if anything, they seem to be scaling back their software effort, letting Google take care of the platform.

(Previously Mot was involved with Symbian and had a custom mobile Linux variant -- http://developer.motorola.com/platforms/mobile-linux -- in addition to its proprietary "dumbphone" OS which is used on most of the handsets the company still manages to sell. All of these projects are likely much bigger efforts in terms of manpower than this new "social" shell on top of Android.)

Hard to believe because it's not true.

Completely misleading headline. Motorola obviously still makes tons of hardware, and they even make the phone in question in this review.