Some random thoughts from reading the thread:
- Google didn't delay this event because of a last minute switch from Samsung. There were a half dozen posts suggesting this earlier. If Samsung isn't making the Prime, it's because they were never making the Prime. To suggest otherwise indicates a lack of knowledge of how businesses operate.
- The "non-AOSP" nature of manufacturer skins goes deeper than just the launcher/widgets/apps. Most of them have custom code in the code base itself that allows some of the more fundamental changes, like widgets in the notification bar or special lock screens or any of a number of other features. Most of these things are possible without the custom code, but the manufacturers aren't taking that route.
The consequence of this is that even removing the custom launcher, replacing it, and deleting all of the "bloatware" with root access (voiding the warranty) does not bring the phone back to AOSP or anywhere close.
Also, the reason they do this is primarily as a market differentiator. It's not really because they love us so much that they want missing functionality to be included - it's mostly so they can say, "my Android phone is different than my competitor's Android phone, because I have Sense/Blur/Touchwiz/whatever."
- Regarding the warranty, it makes perfect sense that rooting your phone would void the warranty. I don't know if you guys have ever supported embedded systems like these but there are so many variables and so few avenues to fix them, that they really have to eliminate all variables. It's not like on a computer where the IT support staff can remote in and find a missing file and replace it.
If you root your phone, you need to know enough about it to put it back to the factory state. If you don't, you probably shouldn't root your phone.
The locked bootloaders and stuff... yeah, I agree. Ridiculous. It should void your warranty, but they shouldn't make it impossible to do. However, I expect some of this stuff will start to go away now that tiered data plans are the norm. Unlimited data was always unsustainable, and they had to try to protect against tethering as best they could. Now that tiered data prevents abusing the tethering plans, I think we'll start to see some of the security measures being relaxed.
If we can get some more support infrastructure in place, like the ability to reload the stock firmware on the phone through the bootloader in a manufacturer-created and supported way, we might even see a future where rooting and ROM'ing doesn't void the warranty. Until there's a supported and easy way to reload the stock firmware, though, the support model is too broken to do anything other than refuse to support rooted phones.
Just my $0.02 from someone who has worked under a few support models for computers and embedded products, and has spent some substantial time working with the business side as well. You may now return to your regularly scheduled speculation
This next one is more of a "What if" question:
) mentions something (maybe) interesting...
