But it's not only an option, it's been a necessity as well, considering how easy it is to end up in a situation where you're forced to reflash. Just look at all those threads ending up with reflashing being the only option to recover the device, and often it's not really because the user has done anything silly.

I had to reflash myself, even though I'm an experienced user, didn't have anything 'risky/untested' installed, and followed the right steps for the 1.1 upgrade. I ended up with an N900 with a destroyed boot loader (thus needing a cold flash, so even the "simple" reflash procedure wouldn't do).

If it's not documented in the manual, and the user isn't aware of, or familiar with this site, then the _only_ option would be to send the device to Nokia for "repair", which would be pretty bad in my opinion.