I made a point of *not* getting my N900 from Vodafone for this very reason. Went to NFS Regent St and they did me an upgrade to my existing contract for the same minutes/SMS/data allowance, £5 less per month and the N900 was free!

As consumers, we need to be demonstrating to the carriers that all this branding nonsense is simply not acceptable - probably the one thing we owe a debt of gratitude to Apple for with the way they did the iPhone with O2 is the fact that they refused to allow branding.

Nothing that a reflash can't put right, but the whole point of the N900 and Maemo is that we shouldn't have to go to such lengths simply to get the functionality that Nokia intended.