Dear God. I'm not a hardware kind of guy, and don't even want to get close to a soldering iron...

But yeah, that's my point -- in the past, portable computing hardware made it strikingly easy to install your own software, up to and including the actual operating system. Today, it is exactly the reverse. And that's the fundamental problem; it doesn't matter if one operating system or GUI is more efficient than another. You aren't the one making that choice; the manufacturer makes a decision, and then penalizes you in every way possible if you don't agree with that decision...