Ok, here's a quick question: "Simply stated, what is the Droid X?"
If you answered "a phone", then rooting isn't really that big a deal. You can work around carrier restrictions and get some more life out of your phone, but that's about it.
Personally, I see a device with a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, a dedicated graphics card, 8 GB of internal storage, a USB host, and network connectivity. That's a general purpose computer. Throw in its mobility and a sensor package that basically makes it a tricorder and you have a very interesting device.
As perceptions differ, so do expectations. Yesterday I wanted to type up a SOAP note, but all of the available desktop computers were in use. Seeing a computer in the palm of my hand, I got the idea that I could just use a USB keyboard with the USB OTG port and type my future notes that way. Oops, Motorola never thought to enable USB OTG, install keyboard drivers, or add anything to the GUI to do that. With root (or perhaps a custom kernel, Linux handles hardware a bit weird IMHO), I can fix that. Earlier this week I tried playing a simple Xvid encoded video in a Matroska container, only to find that the proper codecs (agh... libraries, again with Linux) weren't installed. On the first day I got my phone I installed Epocrates only to find that it needed an older version of libwebcore.so, which, without root, I couldn't install. (Fortunately the update fixed this.)
The usefulness of a general purpose computing device shouldn't be lost on anyone who didn't buy a tool just to read this forum. Verizon doesn't want to sell them since then they'd become a dumb data carrier, could no longer justify nickel and diming people on add-on services, and could only compete with other carriers on throughput, latency, and price. Motorola doesn't want to sell them because they'd saturate their market in no time, since people wouldn't need multiple specialized devices when a single device would suffice. (Amusingly, they do love to take advantage of general purpose open source software so they don't have to develop everything from scratch for every device.) Google would love for this to happen since then you could do a Google search from your toaster, hence the push for openness from them. In short, empowering the consumer in a small way, through root, is the foot in the door for creating a buyer's market that's less favorable to Verizon and Motorola.
Oops, that's starting to get into philosophy and hypotheticals. Suffice to say, if you see the potential of your device then you try to break the artificial limitations that prevent you from realizing it.
