My first reaction to this was "why would the carriers strangle their business this way?". You'd think that they'd want to encourage innovation to increase consu

My first reaction to this was "why would the carriers strangle their business this way?". You'd think that they'd want to encourage innovation to increase consumption of high margin features like SMS. It occurs to me after a moment of thought that the farther these devices get from voice, the closer they get to straight IP connected data devices, which is a comparatively low margin future. I can say that at no point do I desire to use SMS, just that it's convenient compared to the web experience on the typical handset. The sooner devices do IP well the better as far as I'm concerned.