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This came up in a game recently and I was curious how this works. There was a neutral character who summoned a celestial wasp to fight a devil. It was said during the game that the celestial wasp was actually the same true neutral alignment of caster. It was also brought up that the celestial and fiendish templates no longer change the base creatures alignment so a celestial bison that can smite evil and had DR/evil isn't a good creature or a fiendish dire wolf that can smite good and has DR/good isn't evil. Is this true?
Also if there's no longer an alignment restriction on celestial or fiendish templates then wouldn't weird things pop up like celestial Pit Fiends and Fiendish Solars? That just doesn't seam right to me.
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The templates only can be applied to summoned critters that have the little asterisk by their name on the chart. So, with Summon Monster VII, you can conjure up a celestial dire shark or a fiendish roc, but a bone devil or vrock will not gain any template, and be your garden variety LE bone devil or CR vrock. So, no celestial pit fiends or fiendish solars, although, by the template in the Bestiary, there is no reason why such things couldn't exist...
The decision to make celestial / fiendish creatures no longer of that alignment (even if summoning one is a good or evil act, and they can smite evil or good, respectively), no longer Int 3 and no longer able to understand commands from their conjurer spoken in celestial / infernal / abyssal was a casualty of the need to save a sentence of wordcount, apparently. They wanted the simple templates as simple as possible, and somewhere with the water, a baby got thrown out.
The 'official response' was that GMs should graciously allow conjured critters with an Int 2 (or Int -, in the case of giant fire beetles and whatnot) and no language to understand the orders of their summoner, within reason, so that the spells aren't completely useless.
My unofficial response is to add the following sentence to the bottom of the Celestial (Fiendish) templates;
Celestial (Fiendish) creatures have the Good (Evil) subtype, have a minimum Intelligence score of 3 and understand Celestial (Infernal/Abyssal).
It would add about 31 words to the book, and possibly lead to the collapse of the space-time continuum, but is more palatable to me than arbitrarily changing how the intelligence and alignment system interact, how the summon monster spells work, how the handle animal / training rules work, etc. to shave two sentences out of a 327 page book.
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By RAW that I have found, that seems to be the case... but it's perfect reasonable to assume that the templates give you the good/evil subtype which means anything that effects that alignment.
First Good Subtype:
"This subtype is usually applied to
outsiders native to the good-aligned outer planes.
Most creatures that have this subtype also have good
alignments; however, if their alignments change, they
still retain the subtype. Any effect that depends on
alignment affects a creature with this subtype as if
the creature has a good alignment, no matter what its
alignment actually is. The creature also suffers effects
according to its actual alignment. A creature with the
good subtype overcomes damage reduction as if its
natural weapons and any weapons it wields are good aligned"
And the celestial template says:
"Celestial creatures dwell in the higher planes, but can
be summoned using spells such as summon monster
and planar ally."
As to this :
"celestial Pit Fiends and Fiendish Solars"
Nope only creatures with an asterisk by their name in the summon monster list can get the celestial or fiendish template... most of these being animals (possibly some magical beasts but I don't remember any of those on the list that got the template). And normally only True Neutral characters can summon whatever monster they want from the list.