"The way OS wars work is..."
To me it seems like so much is different that I'd be very hesitant to have such a strong opinion. The players are established companies, it's phones and tablets (cheaper devices with shorter lives), the web is the killer app, software development is easier (in many ways), it's twenty years later....
Openness is not a tactic of any particular war. It is simply the best thing for consumers and developers. The notion that openness doesn't matter in this "war" just because the devices look different and the battleground is the web, is nonsensical. I would argue that openness matters even more now than it did in the late 80s and early 90s, because the form factors are more widely varied, and the number of people who can directly participate is dramatically higher.
Regardless of Apple fanboyism and arguments about the war being "different this time", Android is already winning. There are more Android phones shipping than iPhones.
I'm on no particular side of anything. I'm not arguing that openness doesn't matter. I can't figure out where you got that. Of course you can argue that openness is more important. My observation is that when people do make those kind of arguments they make a sort of a deterministic argument surprisingly often.
Incidentally, the rest of this thread is a good place to make your argument that android is already winning.