"[...] yesterday, Qualcomm announced plans to produce Windows 8 tablets and ultrabook-style laptops built around its ARM-based Snapdragon processors"
Those will be locked out as well.
This is exactly what Cory Doctorow was talking about in his article the other day about "the war on general purpose computing" - (http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html)
If anything, Microsoft is better in the sense that it offers more share of the app cost to the developers and also doesn't charge tithes like Apple does on content.
No, not really. There's still a long way to go.
And Microsoft's revenue sharing model vs Apple's doesn't have much to do with that.
Now that their OS is open source, too, I'd love to see the rise of HP/Palm in the hacker community. They're not just accepting of hackers, they actively encourage it in all aspects.
These are just value propositions from an also ran.
Apple takes a cut on sales because that's what store's do. If I sell cereal to a supermarket and you walk in and buy a box, the store does not give me all of that money. Why? Because the store worked hard to get that customer to walk in. Similarly Apple worked hard to make ITMS and App Store work, bringing millions of customers to the apps and music. And no one calls the supermarket's cut a tithe either.
Why support MS because they came later, copied the successful innovation and undercut it by a few %? Supporting the company doing the innovating seems like a better path to incentivizing other companies to innovate new products and markets instead of just copying what's successful.
The tithe reference is to the content, not the cut of the cost of an app, which Apple neither hosts nor delivers, but takes a 30% cut of.
Eg. http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/
Also, why can't your argument extend to ISPs? They have done all the hard work getting the customer, why shouldn't they be able to charge YouTube for allowing them to show ads to their customers?