I was rather sloppily using "open" to mean "allows the owner to do whatever he wants to with the product" rather than open as in Open Source. Can you imagine how well things would work for Apple if iPhones trivially allowed root access + shell as the N900 does? How many phone support people would they have to add to handle calls from people who did some variation of "rm *" ? Imagine how easy it would be to write mallicious apps for a phone that allowed naive users that kind of control over their product. Having a wonderful little computer in your pocket that you completely control, which also happens to be a mobile phone, is just not the right product for most people, no matter how pretty the UI is, and no matter how slick the marketing is.