Closed development vs open development....no brainer for techies...
I get a kick out of reading the blogs by various clueless "tech savvy" editors who claim developers have gotten a glimpse of the darker side of Apple. Please. Just... Please. I got an eye-full of that when I was forced to buy a Mac to do development for iPhone. I got another eye-full of that when I had to pay $99 for the privilege of downloading my own App to my own bleeding iPhone. I got another eye-full when I was told that I could only "provision" an unrealistically small number of iPod Touches for my testers, clients, and their helpdesk. I got another eye-full of it when my provisioning profiles periodically expired and I had to waste another billable hour going through the effing torture of acquiring another renewal. And so on, and so on, and so on. With my 'Droids, I can compile edit, debug, and download my app to an actual device -- not a Simulator -- without having to be a cubicle-code-slave to little Stevie Jobs. The irony is with this constant stream of abuse, Jobs thinks he's also entitled to tell me what language I can code in.
Wrong.
Apple goes on the back-burner for me now, unless the client wants to pay a very fat premium.
What the usual fanboiz on this thread don't seem to get is that it's immaterial both to Google and to Apple whether iPhone/iPod Touch is competing with one 'Droid device or Avogadro's number of different kinds of machines. Apple is a hardware maker. Google isn't. So every 'Droid sold by any manufacturer cuts into Apple's hardware market share or potential share, and hurts them. This costs Google nothing, and every 'Droid that connects to Google's content helps them. In the long run, I don't see how Apple can be anything but a niche player once they lose the anti-competitive leverage they've enjoyed by virtue of their numbers edge.
Jobs also doesn't seem to understand that his closing the door on millions of non-Objective-C developers comes at the worst possible time for him. The App Store is completely saturated, so developers looking to cash in are going to go to the new market, and that's 'Droid. And, there are a lot more Java and C# developers than there are Objective-C coders. Cool Google Apps will be developed very quickly -- even more quickly once MonoDroid kicks in. Then the awful way that Apple treats developers will really begin to bite, because nobody using an obsolete IDE like XCode/IB is going to be able to keep up with programmers who have modern tool-chains.