With the level of control that Apple demands, you’re right in that there are opportunities for others… but not as competitors, rather partners. Apple needs to ditch the “walled orchard”.

Full disclosure, I work for InnoPath, a company that can help Apple expand beyond tethering users to iTunes and let them do things like update, patch and fix the iPhone over the air with FOTA and other standards based device management technologies. We can also help them in the enterprise, as most IT departments prefer a central management model and want to be able to update and manage over the air.

Apple’s assumed goal is to protect the integrity of its product and its customers and there’s other ways to accomplish that -- open standards being one of them -- that will be better for the overall lifecycle management of the iPhone and its users.

Although the kill-switch capability can be likened to mobile device management (as you suggested), MDM aims to ensure an optimal user experience; in addition to the security of “zapping a lost/missing handset to prevent compromised data,” folks like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. are using this technology to also update network and user configuration settings and push out OS and application updates, all “over the air”… consumers love this because they avoid the inconvenience of recalls or the need to return to the retail store to have the handset flashed to fix a bug, and the phone works as promised … giving them more time and money to spend at … where else? The Apple store. ☺