The ads are so good that I'd choose an ad-supported kindle over an ad-free one at the same price point. Virtually all my shopping, aside from perishable foods, can be done at Amazon.com -- I've bought toilet paper, ketchup, packing supplies, cereal, etc. there -- that the offers will probably pay for the device.

I suspect the vast majority of customers don't care about the ads, and wouldn't expect them to pay to remove them in the first place.

As far as ad-supported services go, the Kindle is actually quite good - totally unobtrusive, and you actually get some good offers, things like $5 off a $10 purchase.

Although the other "special offer" kindles have been jailbroken for some time, the kindle hacking community seems to be doing a good job of refusing to (at least for the relative layman) disable advertisements on them or enable any sort of tethering over 3g.

You must have a certain website or subset of the community in mind. I actually got a Kindle 3 a couple months ago and the majority of the discussion that I could find about homebrew on the device was centered around removing the ads. I browsed 4 or 5 forums before deciding it was a lost cause.

In fact, I wasn't even really able to find anything other than removing the ads and changing the screensaver as what you can do after your kindle is jailbroken.