Yes they did -- but as a thought experiment, these types of security measures could be totally reasonable to have if the owner of the phone had root. Sure, lock

Yes they did -- but as a thought experiment, these types of security measures could be totally reasonable to have if the owner of the phone had root. Sure, lock my phone down until the cows come home.. but I hold the master key (or I can get it easily in a fashion I have control over -- if you fear being forced to under duress then you can set something up to prevent that). Lets be real here (as many people mentioned) the key exists, its just not in your hands as the phone owner. It is in the manufacturers hands. And we want it. The one problem to solve is how to verify that you own the device. Saying that that is too hard to solve is not a good enough reason to deny people from having it. There are 100 solutions to this that cryptography folks could devise -- probably folks here could think of tons (one time keys, requiring physically going to a safe place to retrieve the key, requiring a secondary person, having the ability to provide provable information to the person who wants the key that the person who you are threatening does not have the ability to unlock it, etc) -- but yea, there is theft, hacking, border security snooping phones, etc.. those all exist, so blocking those people from getting root on your device is critical -- now lets think of solutions rather than saying OK Apple and Google get to own my device. If we are one patch away from essentially having no clue whats running on our phones, then we are in way more trouble than we thought we are in... we should have "right to root" on our devices now.