Depends on the perspective ...
From a perspective of a developer ,hacker ,ROM flasher-fanatic ..Locked Bootloader is a hindrance .Thats a minority ...
To be precise smartphone were designed to use in corporates and offices .
if I were an employer ,the last thing i would want is ,employees with phones having locked bootloaders ..
As an employer ,I would actually love phones with iron tight bootloaders and encrypted file systems .
Gingerbread introduced Encryption on android and i believe it was implemented on most moto phones rather quickly
That was moto's(and is maybe) target audience .
To put into perceptive
For a locked bootloader + encrypted File system ,it's impossible to extract data from a phone dump without a password and it is relatively hard to get a phone dump .
For a locked BL without encryption (without the option of official unlocking):It still is hard to get a phone dump ,and if there is a patch there is a chance of data corruption to data wipe .Relatively it's still safe ..
For a locked BL with an option to unlock : The dev option wipes the data so there is no chance to recover it .The security level is similar as above IMO .
For an unlocked Bootloader :It will take 10 minutes to dump the data , 5 minutes to copy ...Faster if there is an access to external media ...
The legal definition of computer is