You realize that if a company wants to put a windows variant on a handheld device, they have to pay a "windows tax"? and (if apple allowed it) if they wanted to put a mac OS version odd they'd have to pay for that as well?
If the person who is paying the "linux tax" doesn't want to pay the "linux tax" it's as simple as removing those parts of the software that use patented technologies such as VFAT. Why did they choose VFAT? is there something wrong with the Linux filesystems that would require no "tax"?
It doesn't matter how much "cheaper" something might be without some "tax" as you say- by the same token one could say there is a case tax for having a case on the device, or a "screen tax" for having a screen, or a colour tax for havign a colour display. It all comes into the final price of the component and that price is repaid and a profit made when the device is sold. The freedom given to people in the various free countries of the world extends to companies as well- if a company wants to put linux on a handheld device, <and> they choose to use a patented technology (such as VFAT) that is there perogative. if the price increase from such a decision makes the product unattainable to most consumers it will not succeed.
It's curious to note that a lot of the implementations of VFAT were not conceived of independently, but drawn on from patents made by microsoft on the technique, which is basically the addition of Long file names to files by using separate directory entries.
Nobody forced them to use VFAT- if they wanted, they could have created their own variant of FAT (which is not patented) or simply used a Linux filesystem.
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