Oh, I totally agree with you here - that being tied down forcibly by the mfrs is a bad thing. And of course I do see the plus points of open source from the philosophical angle (and I subscribe to the same philosophy).

But my earlier point was that with hardware obsolescence not being a factor, people will still move away from a hardware (albeit slowly) which supports open source software and itself is open to modify when the manufacturer drops the hardware platform from constinous development - and this is mainly due to the fact that the natual development ecosystem of any hardware/software conbination needs both the components - hardware and software to be in active development to sustain the market interest and involvement.