Fixed for ya. I have asked several people on tech forums if they know what kind of changes are coming with 7.1.1 over 7.0, no one could answer.
So, it's a point update. As far as new features, very little was introduced in 7.1. I think the Night Light was the highlight feature. It was mostly just solidifying the OS. Thankfully, 7.0 wasn't as broken as 5.0 was.
People forget that starting with Lollipop, Google started decoupling their core services from the base OS. It was well understood at the time that marked a strategy change to fix Android upgrade fragmentation. Even many of Samsung (core) services are optional downloads now, and naturally they are updated via Samsung app store, regardless of Android version Samsung Experience version.
Play Services were introduced around Jellybean 4.3 (not Lollipop), and during that I/O, Google made a very purposeful point to not talk about the next version of Android nearly as much, because that was the year Google showed how they would upgrade Android without the OEMs or carriers. Android O is taking that much further, in that
Project Treble will allow updates to the OS while significantly reducing or eliminating the work needed by OEMs or carriers.
Furthermore, Google do not have monopoly on what goes on the next version of Android. It does technically, but many of the "new" features of Android are often what OEMs have offered in their products for a while, which Google later adopts/copies for the next version of Android.
What are you trying to say? The only thing is that Google is slower to implement OEM features into the core OS, as those features prove themselves to be worth incorporating. Yes, OEMs get them first and test the waters, but you also don't want Google, the company that does have a monopoly on what gets committed to AOSP, taking the spaghetti approach to the OS. Or is every single Touchwiz "feature" just amaze-balls?
Unless there is a genuine paradigmatic shift with a new OS or a brand new design guide is introduced, I see no reason to put so much weight on updates just for the sake of them. Another interesting point of data is that the OEMS that heavily relied on so-called "Stock Android Experience," have not been very successful in attracting consumer interests. (see Google Experience Edition, Motorola, Sony, and OnePlus, etc. as well as dozens of cheap Android tablets at local electronics stores that are more or less running the stock-ish Android)
Last I checked, Sony has a very loyal fanbase, small in the US but doing well enough for themselves internationally. Moto was quite popular before Lenovo bought them out, and they still also have a very loyal fanbase thanks to their mid- and low-end offerings still being top recommends. My opinions of OnePlus aside, they are doing quite well.
And you are ignoring security in your dismissal of updates. If another Stagefright hits, Google is probably the only company that will have a patch deployed in a timely manner.