Could care less about the bootloader. I just want a phone that works great out of the box without having to spend time tweaking it.
No offense, but I think you might be missing the point here. It's not a matter of "needing" to "tweak" the phones. It's that within the Android community there are those who are nothing short of brilliant and anytime you get a large group of intelligent people together in one place, talking about the same thing, great ideas will be discovered.
Many of these ideas are incorporated into projects like CyanogenMOD and other ROM's like it. These ideas might be simple performance tweaks or they might be whole new features that Google's dev team hasn't even dreamed up yet.
The problem many of us have with Motorola's philosophy on this is not that we believe the phone will not be usable out of the box. It's that we want to have the ability (should we choose to do so) to experiment with this great OS and the amazing hardware that companies keep putting out with this OS.
That's not saying that *everyone* needs to root and play with custom ROM's. I know many friends who I've talked into getting Android devices and they ask me "Should I root it and stuff?" The whole decision of whether or not to root really just depends on what you want to do and why you think you need to. Often, after talking to people, they don't need to root. In fact most of my Android-owning friends don't root. I waited almost six months after getting my phone to decide to do it, and I love the ability I now have to change anything.
That said, I'm a computer programmer for a living and I've been learning to write applications for Android so I have a fairly good understanding of what I'm doing. Many people don't. And that's OK.
Another user several replies up made the comment about "Carriers should just give customers to option to unlock the phone and void their warranty." That is, effectively, what most manufacturers are doing with the way they are designing the hardware now. They don't *really* want you to unlock the phone, but it's possible. Motorola has gone a step further by introducing hardware that makes the phone unusable if you unlock it. Practically all phones have a "locked" boot loader. It's this extra little chip that "polices" the boot loader to make sure it stays locked that most people are upset about.
If you're not the tech savy type who just wants a great phone with the features, then by all means grab the phone you like best. For many of the rest of us (and it's not a small percentage, M, if you're reading) we're going to pass on the big M's products until they figure out they're better off making devices that people actually want to buy.