alt Hacker NewsThey are, but that's hardly unique to Qualcomm. Tons of hardware with "proper" upstream Linux drivers still requires closed-source firmware blobs, and in particular with anything wireless that's probably an unwinnable battle due to regulatory constraints.
Closed source firmware is one thing that actually runs outside the Linux system... but there's also the user space libraries that are needed to interact with the drivers (eg libgl etc... or the vendor partition in most Android phones)