Android on TV may be d-pad/select style, but many Android apps aren't. For example, the Australian public broadcaster ABC produces an Android app called iView, but it is almost unusable on an Android set-top box without a mouse.
Sadly, that's correct. Those apps should declare that limitation in their manifests. Which would in the case you cite lead to a TV app not being offered to TV devices.
Botches like that are mostly due to buying cheapass, low-bidder implementations that don't implement the d-pad navigation methods in custom View classes. Actually, it's pretty difficult to avoid inheriting the default method implementations so the deficiency is probably mostly in not handling the highlighting and selection methods. Shoddy!
