And then spend countless hours tether-booting it, trying unreliable jailbreak hacks and stumble across issues with Cydia?
Or maybe you just don't care about jailbroken freedom, in which case: Why didn't you buy an Iphone4 in the first place? They were roughly the same price...

On the other hand you could just get a phone from one of the manufacturers that really cares about updates, like HTC, even if that means having a less impressive hardware. You did a choice knowing full well the manufacturer's notority for not caring about updates or if you didn't then you should have looked it up first.
Complaining about having to do stuff yourself afterwards is kinda... stupid

Give this one a try: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1363593
I think you'll find it icy-sweet enough
True, Samsung doesn't care about software updates, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't either.

Oh, and if your GPS antenna is broken or has bad contacts; you can order a new one for roughly 10-20$ off eBay, replacement is easy with just 2 screws.
However I usually find external bluetooth receivers with SIRF3-chips the best; my "Road66"-one even manages to get a steady and accuracte fix in large cities, has 6 hours battery charge and takes around 10 seconds to cold-start (I dont know how it does it... amazing!)

I for one am quite pleased with my Galaxy S (first revision), even if not with Samsun'g customer service. Well, that's what homebrew is for, isn't it? ;)

Nothing. But it's a pain in the ass to get people to write well if they can just be lazy...

The government seems to figure they rather be poor than dead, seeing that a lot of 2011's uprisings were successful.

The reasoning is more like that he wouldn't have doped with such a trivial method if he had known he would be found in the test.
And you can't honestly believe he hoped for "some luck" to make his test results look normal...

I'm sure they wait until the value falls to a reasonable level =)

Take a look at the 'China Tablets'. They more or less provide what you'd expect of them (and can usually play videos and Angry birds too) while sometimes even featuring HDMI ports for external television sets for a very affordable price.
However you'd have to live with resistive displays (not on all models), low-powered CPU's, low-resolution LCD panels, not-too-great battery life (3-6 hours) and sometimes unusable audio outputs and some devices tend to break down after a few weeks (check forums for issues in advance...)
Oh and there are even copies of the copies =)

I got a Flytouch2 and while not great for most stuff (especially not when compared to an iPad) it works for reading mail, checking the weather forecast, ...

Android nor iOS do not -and could not- prevent you from running any other operating system.
It's the darn bootloaders, closed-source drivers, dreadful reverse-engineering and lack of schemata that's causing the issues with running other OS

All non-Windows x86-tablets (like the Wetab) have official or unofficial methods (e.g. writing 'magic bytes' at the beginning of a USB stick) to get them to boot from it and run any desired OS.

I meant a tool that allows non-geeks to click a single button (or better no button at all...) and it installs + updates the relevant contents in the hosts file

Good thing I live in a country with (more or less) sane laws and where people even use eMule without having IP-lawyers storming their porch =)

It's rather common logic that, if two tablets with strikingly similar hardware sell at a price where one is the double of the other, one of the 2 is not going to make a lot of money off the hardware, at least not compared to the other.
Building such devices is very expensive, only the touchscreen or ARM cpu with it's stacked RAM will cost a lot, let alone the battery.

The analogy would rather be that they installed a V12 in your 80mile-tops van and you found a secret and not vendor-endorsed method for unlocking
all the horse power in the beast.

The vendor, trying to protect his investment and also concerned for the driver's security closes that particular Chip glitch.

In this case simply because Amazon wants you to buy their stuff.
Remember, Amazon makes no profit on the Fire -some even claim it comes at a loss-, they're a company and not your local welfare!

If you expect your tablet to be rootable then you must be prepared to pay somewhat more for a device that the manufacturer makes money on...

You could build a ABC-proof shelter and stock enough food for the next 50 years.
However you'd need an EMP-proof satellite dish for internet uplink, since your resistance would be futile otherwise

Couldn't you just use alternative DNS servers or use a tool which hardcodes it in the 's hosts file or am I missing the point?
Switching browser due to an extension which hackishly has a static hosts file seems kinda odd for a tech site.