> And because every phone is running the same software, well, it should all just work, shouldn't it?
As we all know, an operating system is simply software. It doesn't interact with hardware and, if it did, the hardware is all completely identical, right? There's absolutely no difference between any of the WP7 phones on the market.
> The company was non-specific about the purpose of the update; it's not the copy-and-paste update that will be shipped next month, but rather an update to somehow improve the update process.
It's a test update, one whose sole purpose is to help Microsoft work with the carriers to figure out how to roll out updates. It's not like remotely updating hardware is a trivial problem. It's better to have a test update fail than a functional update fail.