Man , they have a sense of humour.

Calling FAT a "cutting-edge intellectual property" is kind of Monty Python's thing ...

There is nothing difficult about a file-system for portable media. There is no excuse for choosing a standard with licensing and patent restrictions. EXT2 is a perfect choice - completely free, stable and proven. EXT3 and EXT4 are not appropriate for the same reasons NTFS is not. EXT2 is a perfect choice - very easy to implement, already used internally in many of the Linux based phones, tvs and GPSs out there.

The problem is Microsoft abusing it's monopoly power by choosing not to support it in Windows. Instead Microsoft creates a new patent encumbered format and licences it for free but only when used in portable media devices. This means Apple will have to pay MS for a licence so MACs can be compatible with the next wave of devices and MS will have another patent hammer the threaten Linux users with.

Why don't all the other manufacturers just support an open standard like EXT2 and eventually force MS to implement it.

Disgusting, considering all the more advanced free and open source alternatives.
I just wonder if there is something passed under the table.

The SD group picked ExFAT as the standard for the next generation SD cards, so that means all companies that want to support SD cards as they grow in size will need to sign up, this isn't a show of support for MS but a reality caused by a standard set by the SD people.
Plus FAT is actually better for flash than NTFS for instance, although of course they could have gone for a non-MS filesystem instead, perhaps one specifically designed from the start for flash media, but they need something now not in 5 years, but there are ready made open-source filesystems though.

Having looked at Wikipedia, it's as I thought, just increases possible sector sizes.

So far as I found, doesn't have binary-tree directory, though perhaps that's okay for intended uses where are only a few files. -- For any app with a thousand or so files, that'd make a crucial, couple orders of magnitude worse performance than other M$-written file systems, like, oh, HPFS...

god no