We've been sitting ducks as well, there are just too many closed bits within fremantle. The propagated freedom has always been an illusion, Morpheus. Ask qwerty. With Mango, M$ already proved that they are listening to its users.
If that's not enough, there is always XDA. When did Nokia as an OS Provider ever listen to us? Granted, Nokia did many things right in the first place, so listening to the userbase would have created warm feelings, but was not really top priority. There is no need to mourn the death of the "truely open phone"-paradigm, because it just never existed.