YES.

You want a guy like Steve in the driver's seat of how your platform should look, behave, and integrate with the user's daily life. Look at Linux: Its promise is that you can make it do or be anything and what has the open source community produced? Well, there's Ubuntu, a pale imitation of Windows in terms of integration, but by and large the open source community has switched to Mac.

If the iTablet were completely closed hardware-wise, had super-restrictive third-party app development, but still offered books, Wikipedia, and video via an always-on connection, for sale or free download as appropriate, it would still be a freakin' boon to mankind. And with the right restrictions in place it would be something immediately beneficial for every user instead of just a geek toy.