I don't think it will make things any worse (it's not really in the interest of hardware manufacturers to lock devices down), but I assume when you can buy a ph

I don't think it will make things any worse (it's not really in the interest of hardware manufacturers to lock devices down), but I assume when you can buy a phone from AT&T with one of these it'll still be locked to "AT&T and roaming partners" by default. There's also the question of what happens when the device breaks, currently you can just take out the SIM and put it in a new device. With this I imagine you'll have to pay the carrier a "transfer fee".