There's nowhere that a non-developer can buy a Nexus One in the US. They aren't for sale. They aren't coming soon. People know a dead phone when they see one.
Google didn't, but all the tech blogs did for some reason. Either they can't read or they have some kind of business motive for making things up. And now they have a reason to generate another story from nothing.
Google has TERRIBLE PR when it comes to stuff like that. They just seem to manage releases so horrendously that it is simply shocking. The whole net neutrality thing being the most recent example.
Not only did the Nexus One "die" without dying, it died multiple times because at each step Google would make some sort of vague release, and again every tech (and mainstream) site would scream that the Nexus One was a failure, it's now dead for super sure, and so on.
Seriously, if someone in the Google executive is reading this: You guys are clownishly amateur at dealing with this stuff.
That is basically what happened, but most people considered that a "death" of sorts since you could no longer get it direct from Google.
I broke down and bought one w/o a contract literally about a day before they announced it - it's the best phone I've ever had the chance to really mess with, hands-down.
If i remember they announced the death of the web store and said that they will bend over to sell in the operator's stores.