The recent Pre news has been pretty encouraging. The lack of a storage card slot is definitely problematic, but they've committed to allowing phone as modem tethering from day one, and will allow users to install apps from outside of the app store without any kind of circumvention needed. Both of these are things that Apple has gotten wrong IMHO, and though I know there are workarounds, it's refreshing to see a company go a bit more laissez-faire on restricting access to the device's capabilities.