Apple has a gajillion dollars. Devs still have to pay $100.

Think of the children. I mean, seriously, how many of us were young highschool hackers who would have just loved the opportunity to build something awesome for smartphones. But would be halted by Apple's fine?

As is, they seem to want you to pay up even to deploy an app you wrote onto your own phone. That's just obnoxious. (Googling around, I can find workarounds, but most seem to require jailbreaks or other strange mummery; see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/246422/how-can-i-deploy-a... for a procedure that's alleged to work without requiring that, but which does require other undocumented mummery with certificates.)

Also, it keeps a lot of people from learning to tinker in ways that could develop into job skills later. While $100 is probably a nuisance fee to most of the people posting here, there are a lot of people in the US (to say nothing of the rest of the world) for whom it blows their hobby budget for the month, if not for the year.

The legal agreement is an interesting thought.

As for a barrier to low-quality apps, it doesn't seem to have worked.

Thanks though, if I want to load programs on my iPhone, I'll do so through Cydia.

Both of those things used to be a big part of the Mac software ecosystem, but they're slowly dying away. And if Apple moves forward with its apparent plan to prohibit unsigned code from running by default, while charging $99/year for the privilege of having your code signed, both will be effectively extinct within the next year.