Comment by backprojection

I generally agree with your sentiment. I think there's an important distinction to add. By and large, people don't fully expect their mobile devices to be general purpose computing machines in the same way that their PCs are. What I expect from my phone, primarily, is convenience and usability.

Of course, at least on android devices, it's not at all uncommon to install custom variants of the OS (CyanogenMod, etc.), so it does happen.