Luckily I don't type "sudo rm -rf /" or similar things in normal conversation very often...

Good thing you didn't post this comment from an Android phone... ;-)

True, you wouldn't type a delete command in normal conversation, but you have to feel sorry for the guys in the bug report who were running ssh sessions on their phones... They were typing UNIX commands and thus were at a much higher risk of harm.

You wouldn't need the "sudo" -- it's a root-level prompt.

(Hmm... typing "make me a sandwich" unfortunately has no visible effects...)

But I hope that they don't cut off root access!

I'm curious: What would you do with root access that you can't already do with the phone itself?

For example: flash your own image (without root, you can only flash image signed by T-Mobile/Google/HTC; how good is to have access to source code, if you can't build it and run it on real device?), create VPN connections, write useful bluetooth profiles like DUN (tethering done correctly) or A2DP. What you can do with root access is much longer list than what you can do the Google blessed way.

The "if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide" argument in another disguise.

You're the one (as much as) arguing in favour of expending effort, adding code and complexity to restrict my root access, the burden is on you to justify doing so, not on me to refute it.

Routing between 3G and 802.11 comes to mind, although I don't know if the kernel has the right modules.