If the iPad were a car, it would be illegal to open the hood.
Yes, there's some 13 year old kids writing iPhone apps. There are even more 13 year old kids writing PC and Mac apps, so I'm not sure what that proves. What there won't be by design in the iPad world is disruptive innovators like Linus Torvalds. As I've said before, that's good for Apple and bad for everyone else.
If the iPad were a car, it would be illegal to open the hood.
That filing was provoked by the EFF's attempt to get it made specifically exempt from copyright protection, but their arguments didn't actually meet any of the established criteria for creating exemptions. Apple's filing, in context, was an objection to the EFF's claims mostly spent pointing this out. The EFF tries to characterize it as Apple trying to get jailbreaking made illegal, but that's not the case. If it weren't already a copyright infringement there would have been no point for the EFF to make their filing in the first place. The whole thing is a bizarre kind of legal trolling, and cringe whenever anybody mentions it because it so severely tarnished my image of the EFF.
Guys, come on here. It's not like apple is against jailbreaking or open development because it's going to destroy the product and they don't want to warranty it (like desoldering components are ripping apart your engine block would), it's that it will disrupt their business model. Why can't I get a grooveshark app without jailbreaking? Is that going to physically break my iPhone? No, it's going to let grooveshark encroach on apple's bottom line.
If the iPad were a car, you'd only be able to install car radios approved by Apple, of which there would be forty or so wildly different options, some of which generally sucked, some of which were meticulously built around a particular set of stations, and some of which you could tune to anything from low-frequency maritime navigation channels to shortwave.
Or you could just take out the radio and install a talking river trout in its place, so long as it was available in the aftermarket catalog.
And there'd be a sea bass version as well.
And if someone created a radio that used too much battery life, I wouldn't be able to install it either.
I can go on if you'd like, but you get the point.
It surprises me how quickly people forget that there's no Opera Mini, no multitasking, no Google Voice, or a myriad other applications that are arguably far, far more innovative than anything that's in the App Store yet you can't access them because The Man told you so. Especially since those are some of the things that make a smartphone so useful.
It is legal to open the hood, just not to tinker with a limited set of the contents. It's the same in cars nowadays, as I understand it. There are plenty of boxes in cars that are protected by DRM of sorts so that you can't reverse-engineer them. (Well, mostly so that it's illegal for you to reverse-engineer it, not that they have to be very secure from being broken)