Re:Tis the Season (Score 1)

To answer your question: a long time, since the vast majority of users, vocal Slashdot geeks aside, don't give a rats ass about hacking any piece of consumer electronics they own. Most people buy products based on the features that the product claim to have, not on features that they *want* the product to have and believe that they can get by hacking the device.

These are the people that Apple is catering to- the people that use their iPhones like they were meant to be used, which means they don't put 3rd party applications on them and hack them like Apple stated explicitly not to. If you use a piece of hardware in a way that the maker has expressly said not to, you have no one to blame but yourself if it doesn't work like you want it to.
Who cares if there are features that are "supposed" to be on the iPhone that can only be had with 3rd party apps? If you want those apps, build your own iPhone. Pretty much everyone who owns an iPhone wants to put 3rd party applications on it.If they install them on the iPhone and the software screws up their phone, who are they going to call for support? Apple, of course. And Apple doesn't want to have to take a lot of calls asking for help with software it knows nothing about. So, what do they do? They make it so that people can't put 3rd party applications on their iPhone if they want to update their iPhone. The iPhone is a fairly new product. You can't expect it to be perfect.
This isn't rocket science, just thinking like a major company with an overly hyped, popular product would.