>the radio in an iPhone can almost certainly be made to operate outside of licensed/compliant limits by tweaking the software. Should they be forced to allow that but still held accountable when their device is noncompliant?

I can see an argument for this. Nothing forced Apple to design their hardware this way: they could have built licensing/compliance limits into the hardware itself. But they didn't want to do that because they wanted to use the same HW for all markets, and different governments have different rules about which frequency bands are allowed. Of course, this then brings up the question: if they did make slightly different HW per-market (perhaps with 1-time fuses), what happens when someone brings their iPhone from one country to another and they've modified it to ignore any new region restrictions (Apple could still use SW to force new restrictions, though they can't allow anything new because of the HW restrictions) and it's broadcasting on an unallowed band?