I respect anyone brave or foolish enough to do a drive swap on a iBook.
What strikes me as nostalgic is how repairable these machines were. No proprietary screws, the HDD used a standard (at the time) form factor and interface. The batteries could even be torn down and rebuilt as they used standard cylindrical cells inside. Hell, the keyboard could be replaced without opening the cover! The only thing that was proprietary was the Airport card - which was under the keyboard along with the SODIMM slot, and both could likewise be replaced without opening the laptop. Those days are long gone.
One item of note is I suspect the older versions of OS X lack SSD TRIM support.
I too lament how closed machines have become and how it affects the environment, data recovery, and just plain ol' repair. Some of those PCI Macs with 603s, 604s and G3s could get up to G4e with CPU boards and industry-standard PCI cards (so long as they had a Mac driver.) Now you can't even add your own storage to most Macs, and the one with PCIe won't let you use your own graphics card.
Edit: I remember some models having the drive in a bay and the RAM in an easily accessible panel (or under the keyboard), but most were a sandwich of tiny panels and cables.
That machine had thermal issues, but HDD and RAM was easy.
Haven't killed one of these machines yet, nor have I ever had "spare parts" after.