My point was that it is not a simple trade-off between "privacy and security" and a lack of those things. In order to get software updates for critical components of the phone, you may need to get a google account, sacrificing some of the "privacy" for software "security". Obviously it does not have to be this way, but it is the way Google has mandated it in their ecosystem.

Edit: One can make the case that it's better to use encrypted SMS with TextSecure, rather than using the push messaging. But, from a metadata standpoint, I believe the push messaging might be better. SMS metadata seems to be automatically handed over to the US government, while they would likely need to issue a NSL, warrant, etc. to get that same information from Google. So using the push messaging may side-step some of the metadata collection that is happening.