Consumer want has to be expressible. It's the "faster horses" problem.

The market doesn't know what it wants until the options exist. Until a culture forms.

Almost all companies are competing in one direction only, a race to the bottom. There's sometimes some semi-geeks freedoms offered, but usually those are gilded cages too. We'd have to go back some something like Maemo to see consumers getting something actually empowering, a portable mobile Linux+FreeDesktop offering.