Yeah, its the "well, legally, we have to provide the source code, but we make it as painful and slow for you as we can without it becoming a blatant violation of the GPL."
I'm pretty sure there is a lot of code in Android that belongs to Google and is not part of an upstream GPL project. They would be completely entitled to stop sharing it.
Not quite, they could make you request it by post and send it on a stack of floppies.