Reason #1 to root and jailbreak anything: If you can't open it then you don't really own it. You have to make things yours or companies will continue to lease you their products for outrageous sums of money. So do it for justice.
Plus all the freaking SSH clients in the app store cost money. I've never seen a platform with such an inverted price vs. value scheme. All of the amazing new innovative software that I would be more than willing to pay for such as Aweditorium and Flipboard is free but all of the stuff I would consider basic utilities like SSH/IM/IRC clients are $2-$5 and definitely not so special as to deserve that price tag. There's a distinct lack of free (as in speech) software on iOS unless you jailbreak.