With BREW you pay $400 at a minimum to be able to sign applications, which is required to run on the device. Consoles and portables invariably end up in the tho

With BREW you pay $400 at a minimum to be able to sign applications, which is required to run on the device. Consoles and portables invariably end up in the thousands (assuming you're an established developer). Even Microsoft's XNA platform for the Xbox360 is $99/yr. and doesn't even allow full access to the device. In terms of openness, the iPhone and Pre are somewhere between these and desktop operating systems. From one side they appear terribly draconian, but from the other, very appealing. This is why you see Apple putting a lot of effort into courting game developers over, say, hobbyists. I'll be damned if I pay an annual fee to deploy my app on my phone. I understand where you're coming from, but if all you want to do is deploy your own app on your own phone, then you're not really using most of what that $99 ostensibly pays for. The people who are paying are generally those who are going to make use of what else it affords them, e.g. the ability to distribute or sell that application to tens of millions of others. They don't really have it backwards--they're just paying for something more than what you're wanting to do.