Android Forking From the Linux Kernel

Google's Android operating system originally designed for phones and eventually tablets and netbooks has broken off of the mainstream Linux kernel. There are enough changes that are being made that Android has "forked" the kernel and aren't using the most up to date Linux kernel with no real indication that Android ever will be. What does this mean for the future of Android and Linux working together?
A fork happens quite a bit with open source software. Everyone has access to the code. At some point in time one group moves in one direction with the code while another group does something else. The intention is generally to stay together but at times for various reasons this does not happen.
While it is nice that Google picked to use Linux as the base, it doesn't seem that their intentions were to contribute to the kernel over the long term and develop with the Linux community. It seems that previous version of Linux was just a good starting point for their project to build the basic operating system on.
This means that as of right now it doesn't look like Android and Linux will be working together. There still are applications that can be shared and possibly drivers, but Google is large enough to pave it's own path if need be with enough programmers to patch up any issues as time goes on.
It should be expected that this would happen eventually because Android doesn't really need many of the kernel updates since it's currently running on very limited hardware.

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