As the original request was at least partially pointed in Google's direction, it's probably reasonable to treat it as including a request that google not punish the user in other ways for rooting.

I do believe fundamentally that if you don't have (or can't easily get) root on a device, you don't really own it. On the other hand, giving unlimited permission to third-party apps isn't a great idea in today's model where arbitrary app developers are most certainly not worthy of unlimited trust. I'd like to have a more sophisticated permissions model, to include things like allowing an app access to only specific files and directories rather than full filesystem access (I'm aware Android has a barely-usable form of this), or network access, but only to specific domain names.