Egerwgg4 below did a much better job. Larry also has a good point, if non-techies don’t understand about rooting, or how it works, what makes you think they are going to do it, and then treat their new power responsibly? I’ve seen plenty of discussions at the Motorola Forum where some person or another, being a non-techie, followed a friend’s or internet person’s advice on rooting, not understanding the implications of what they did, and decided to delete bloatware from their phones, only to find out later that they needed that same bloatware if they wanted to update their phones from froyo to gingerbread.

Of course, I’m generally against 1-click root methods for this very reason. In order to ensure that only people who know what they are doing do it, rooting should not be made this easy.

Not that it would do me that much good, rooted as I am, but try to explain root to some people and their heads explode like in Scanners. But that status bar widget is still the best thing I’ve put on my phone that wasn’t originally on it.

I do understand the argument that rooting makes Android seem complicated for the masses. However, as Andrew stated, rooting is not complex at all. Really, it’s the complication is on the shoulders of the device manufacturers and carriers. Phones should just come pre-rooted since anyone who wants to root can root their device anyway. In instances where an app wants to use root, there’s already a prompt, so it’s not like having someone’s phone pre-rooted would inherently expose them to more risks that they may be unfamiliar with.