Depends on how broadly you interpret "etc." For example, iPads are not legal to jailbreak. Also, while jailbreaking an iPhone is legal, performing a carrier unlock without the carrier's permission is illegal. (This is all for the US. Other jurisdictions may and certainly do vary.)

Do you actually own a carrier-locked phone though? It's not like a car that is owned by the bank for a few years until you pay it off, and then you get the title and keep driving it.

A phone you buy on a 2 year contract is yours at the end of the contract. Then you get a new phone and give the old one to whoever in your family needs a new one, or just put it on ebay for fifty bux and change.

Oh well. We should just have law that states that any device should have its boot keys changeable by its owner. Even if not able to root ios, you will still be able to run your own software on it (and device like iphone will be reversed engineered in days).

Why? The device is built and sold in a particular configuration, among other things attempting to ensure the user doesn't do things with the device which the manufacturer didn't intend but will likely get blamed for. (Ex.: user, on recommendation of friend, "jailbreaks" an iPhone and installs new software which is buggy/slow, resulting in user telling others how crappy the iPhone is - even though the problem isn't Apple's fault, and Apple took measures to prevent such changes from happening.)

The hardware & software have a symbiotic relationship. Each must function within certain developed parameters to ensure the other can function within its specified parameters. That's how Apple can use lighter-weight & cheaper hardware yet get greater performance: both hardware & software are tuned together for optimized performance. Android, like Windows, is suffering from having to support unknown hardware. You're demanding that, under police power of the state (note that: you're threatening to arrest people for this), Apple explicitly allow/support software which Apple has absolutely no control over yet will get grief for when it sucks.

Relevant to the original point: a car manufacturer doesn't want users patching in home-brew software which changes/breaks safety features. While such could be done with hardware, they're increasingly trying to do things to prevent those changes too (model-specific parts, hindering others from making & using inferior components).