I would never deny someone the right to be sceptical

Yes. The Microsoft mobile, palm and presumably other manufacturers also have a management mode to prevent unsupervised access to the phone/data stack. They are all mature phone platforms. The iPhone is very new and runs a version of OSX, which was not designed to go on a phone. It is impressive what they have done, but it is early.
It is very important when people pay for their data (and whether they do on AT&T, when they get to the rest of the world they will) that the phone doesn't allow applications unfettered access to the network.

I don't know about linux phones, I have never seen any provided by a network in the UK although obviously that doesn't meant they didn't, and in fact it seems I was wrong about orange not having linux phones:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7533886035.html


As you say you can create 3rd party software for the iPhone currently but that is not with apples permissions, and there are probably no restrictions on what you can do on the network.
If you get someone to install something on one of those phones that can exploit a weekness on the iPhone and get an application installed, there would be nothing to stop it. On a nokia it would ask you if you wanted to connect.
But that is not an approved thing. And of course you can crash the network, you can crash any network if you 'get lucky'. Didn't AT&T crash their phone network once with some bad programming on a switch?

I do think there will be some access coming, even if it is just flash. I think that the platform is young, and they haven't really had time to do anything and their priority is getting it out there.
Ultimately they know there wont be any stopping it but you know how controlling apple are, they will do it on their terms. They also have to make sure that people can't access the network without permission. Maybe that is just for the carriers piece of mind, but a large part of the phone market is political rather than technical.

I am there ready to buy one as soon as there is some sort of application environment, this is if the european one gets 3G - a non 3G phone isn't much use to me at this point.