Lately, I'm not sure whether the Cyanogen team are deluded or just plain foolish.
After the OnePlus One fiasco it's clear they don't seem to have an understanding of how the market actually works and what the current market conditions are. They are looking very much like a band of developers winging it against the big players, with varying degrees of success.
Samsung, with all its resources and know-how has been desperately trying to achieve the same "Google-free" goal for years now, but they consistently fail because consumers just aren't interested in pale imitations of Google services, when they can just buy an Android device that has access to the real, full suite anyway.
The only company that has managed to succeed in achieving a "Google-free" Android is Amazon, purely because Amazon's strength is online services, and they have their own ecosystem that was already very well established.
The key here is that the consumer needs to be convinced/drawn into a strong ecosystem to back up the OS, or it will fail. At the moment only Amazon's services can realistically sustain themselves away from Google, and even then, services like Gmail and Maps are still needed on their devices.
Google is not stupid, Android itself is open, but Google and its services are not, and it's the one trump card that seems to have everyone's backs up.