I haven't been able to find a link, but I remember seeing a link to a graph published by Verizon a few months ago which outlined that they expected that with the advent of LTE and it's gradual upgrades that there would be a shift toward data only packages by sometime around 2014. It mentioned the adoption of VOIP/SIP for the majority of voice and video communications, and chat like programs/email replacing SMS.
This led me to believe that these big companies are expecting devices like this to be the future, but they don't believe that their networks are presently able to hold the network load, thus they are currently restricting VOIP, etc.

If anyone knows where I can find this graph, I'd love to link to it...surely I'm not the only one who saw it.

Your best bet is probably to "buy" a phone using your discount and then resell it on ebay, which would theoretically recover more money than you paid for it after the subsidy.