Here is my perspective as an iPhone owner. I'm not too familiar with the details of the unlocking process but as far as I can tell if you have third party apps running on your phone the phone will need to be re-activated after installing the update (as I thinkthe phone gets wiped in the process). It makes sense to me that since unlocking modified some internal state of the phone the re-activation might break. I don't think it's apple's job to resolve bugs baused by third party hackers. I'm not even sure this disabling is intentional.

The same thing applies to third party apps. Why should Apple go to the trouble to make sure the upgrade doesn't break third party apps? If you're brave enough to hack your phone you have to take certain risks. If you decide to unlock the phone then don't upgrade until someone figures out how to work around this.

And for all the complaining of locked phones, Apple had to make some deals with AT&T for the phone to work the way it does. AT&T had to upgrade it's EDGE network, it had to build support for visual voicemails and allow for users to activate their iPhones (and sign up for service using iTunes). I can only imagine all of these changes required a lot of money to implement and as such it doesn't sound unreasonable to ask for an exclusivity deal in return. If you want a phone that work internationally go buy a Blackberry (the blackberry is a much better phone in my opinion, the only thing the iPhone does much better, and the deciding factor for me, was the web browser).