I totally agree with you, Tyndall, and want to add my experience: I own the Nexus 7 2012 since 2013 and the experience out of the box was great. Never had the actual need to root that great piece of technology. Recently, like 1 week ago, I received the worst Android update, called Lollipop, which basically turned my device into a paperweight, unusable, stuck on most screens, apps crashed and the tablet itself randomly rebooted. I decided to downgrade to KitKat 4.4.4, and no root is needed for that. So, the only actual reason why I finally rooted my device, was in a desperate attempt to stop OTA (Over The Air) updates, because I want to stick with the current Android version. And I still can't do that without impacting on Google's great apps, like GooglePlay, even though I'm a root user. So, my advice, even though I'm arriving late to this party, is no, you don't need to root your Nexus 7 at all. Only if you want to tweak some details to improve some details, but I would say that's almost being picky. You can even manually change your Android version without needing to root your device. You risk to change thinks in it that could turn it into a useless device, so be careful.