But what if I want to transplant a part from my old phone to a phone same model that I both legitimately own? Why should Apple be the one to stop me? Why not let the user enable/disable the SW lock, like a lo-jack?
Do you live in an area where phone theft is rampant? Ok, then leave SW lock enabled on your phone's parts.
Do you want to legitimately transplant parts off your old phone to your new phone? Then let the user disable the SW lock after entering their PIN or Face-ID or whatever.
It's not like this is some super-complex problem Apple couldn't solve with a few line of code to have the best of bot worlds if they really wanted to.