“It’s not a matter of being okay with a gimped phone, or not having the acumen to flash.”
Sure it is. If I tell you that your carrier has disabled the wireless tether function on your phone because they want to charge you to be able to do so even though you’ve already paid for a certain amount of bandwidth...and you don’t care even if I offer to do it for you for free is being OK with a gimped phone.
Anyone who doesn’t work around Wifi and has would still like to use their wireless devices would stand to benefit from that.
Don’t want to spend $629 dollars on an iPad 2 with 3G? Just buy the wifi only model for $499 and tether it wirelessly through your phone. There, I just saved you $130 bucks on the iPad or $20 bucks a month w/AT&T.
"Are you sure this won't violate my warranty or get me in trouble with Verizon?" You do know the carriers are monitoring traffic to detect unauthorized tethering, right? I don't agree with it, but that's the state of things.