It's simple, if Nokia includes root out of the box they'll have to deal with a lot of bricked devices by noobish users. So they can't take that responsibility. We as a community can sometimes help the noobs and tell them to install rootsh and what to type in the terminal. But by having everything seeming too easy for them to do with the RPM, they're going to be confident in doing it alone and do even more damage.

The argument with the broken package manager is invalid, because it doesn't solve all problems by having root by default. Sometimes the device is so damaged that one can only ssh in it and then bring it back up with a few comands. So are we going to demand that a ssh server be running all the time and installed by default just because there's a potential benefit if the device gets broken in some very specific and rare case?