Honestly, Google should require as part of the Play Store certification that vendors ship their goddamn drivers in a quality that is acceptable to upstream Linux, or at least get them to staging quality.
The situation exists entirely because Google created it, they designed a HAL (hardware abstraction layer) with the intention of letting device manufacturers design devices while skirting GPLv2 requirements.
Probably you can get some sort of AOSP build running on it, and patch it yourself to get at least somewhat up-to-date components.