I think SenileBobs way of thinking is probably correct. We might not like the idea of turning the N800 into a non-customizable device, but this is definitely the thinking of much of the industry. They believe that customization leads to unpredictable behaviour (which honestly, is true enough, when seen from their point of view), and believe that while they could just blame the customer by voiding the warranty, this would just bring lots of bad PR (which is definitely true). This is definitely the approach of Sonos, PVRs, DVD players and most cellphones.

I think, maybe, an intermediate solution is to leave it customizable and believe enough in the platform, that people will not be able to break the flasher. In that way you can just supply a flasher image that people can use when they break the software you put into the system.

For those of us that know not to touch anything we can't fix if it breaks, a fully customizable device is great. For the average consumer, you can either limit their ability to meddle or suffer the bad PR when they break it and claim it's your fault for not making stable software. This is much more of a problem in the US where you might even be sued for it.

One more thing to worry about is that when you sell a device with software on it, you had better control all of it in some way. When using an N800 as a platform, you have the additional complication of open source software, that gets upgraded outside of your control(not necessary a bad thing, but definitely something to be taken into account). You have to support the thing, even if it is someone else's repository that crashes or supplies a bad library. For this, the N800's track record is not great. The lack of a stable, controlled distribution network is also one of the reasons that the N800 is not quite mainstream yet. Hopefully this will be much better now, that we're closer to the Debian codebase.