It's incredibly and artificially limited to what you can do on these devices. But let's just throw in the bit that folks hate discussing but needs to be said: these devices are limited as such not because of the willing minority such as yourself that are savvy enough to do those things but because the big corporations will never make a dime if somebody were able to purchase something and in 10 years, still be able to update, alter, manipulate that device. That big corporation would lose out 10 years of purchases - scarier if those savvy people were to share their findings and teach others.

You're right. We should be able to do whatever we want with our hardware. We've purchased it. It should update indefinitely or at least the big corporations should have some "exit strategy" that leaves us in control when they announce the next version. This ignores a ton of technology advances, but it creates a hard to support situation.

In the end, I'm convinced that's perhaps the best way to go - give control over to the people when the next version comes out. Not something minor to ask for either. But in recent history; I cannot name anything that was not originally targeted for tinkerers, embraced by tinkerers that stayed a device that was in use and under our control years later. In fact, hell... I'd ask somebody to name something outside of older computers to name something that fits your criteria even closely.

This current world of products plain sucks and will be obsolete by the time I've finished this last sentence... </hyperbole>