Your comment is completely salient and relevant here, but it's received down-votes because it proposes sacrificing profits (i.e., hand-holding, generally cloud-hosted software) for freedom, and Hacker News is simply too sophisticated for such idealism.
I find your usage of the word "freedom" here highly suspect.
This "freedom" is reserved for a very, very small class of people. Conversely, as much as you might not like it, an experience that hand-holds offers a kind of freedom for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to take advantage of modern hardware and/or software.
In theory, there doesn't have to be such a dichotomy between freedom and superior polish/UX. In practice, I feel strongly that there is. The popularity of such hand-holding, "freedom"-restricting devices is also highly suggestive.
Depending on where you sit, Android seems to bridge the gap, but as an Android user for years, I'm not completely convinced it's a superior experience.
I'm not unsympathetic, but I think the above view is detached from the reality of modern computing as the majority of people experience it.
