Phil's a cool, intelligent guy, but this statement pegs my meter somewhere between "excessive optimism" and "ridiculous Apple fanboyism".

Apple, the infamous UX control freak, will give up the control (and revenue) associated with the MFi program in favor of allowing their users to customize their experience? What's next, Windows 8 will run an OpenBSD kernel?

Sorry, perhaps that last was excessively sarcastic, but let's be realistic here: one of Apple's fundamental properties is its fanatical control over every aspect of the way that users interface with the device, directly or indirectly. They will never give this up.

MS/NOK (funny how, at least in my mental model, they're one entity in the phone market now) and (especially) HP/Palm should be looking at this and thinking about doing the same. RIM probably doesn't care because their userbase doesn't.