What phones/carriers allow this without jailbreaking? What stores/carriers sell those phones to consumers?
T-Mobile and my local carrier Cincinnati Bell are both happy to recommend and "sell"/refer you to a Nexus One. CBW even has a couple N1's on display in their premiere display case, and a rep even asked me about what ROM I used on my N1, and said he used CyanogenMod on his.
Does each carrier post source to their builds so I can modify what the phone came with?
The carriers aren't the ones writing the software; you'd have to talk with HTC, Motorola, Samsung about that. Some carriers make specific requests, like Sprint putting their NASCAR app on, or Verizon's exclusive Skype app, but that's an app, not Android.
Have ANY of you built Android from source and used that on your phone? How did it work out?
I've had multiple attempts over the past couple years to build my own Android ROM, most recently with Cyanogen's mass of repos on Github, but either I wasn't looking in the right spot, or there wasn't enough documentation for me to figure out how to build it all on my own, so I failed on that aspect.
However, MoDaCo forum has the concept of "kitchens" where you can customize what features you want to include/exclude from various ROMs, and allows you to generate "your own" ROM that you can then flash to your phone, and I personally find this extremely attractive, even if I don't use it for myself because I like what the "vanilla" Cyanogen build includes.
All that said, you do however have multiple valid points, and I don't disagree with you on any of them.
T-Mobile and my local carrier Cincinnati Bell are both happy to recommend and "sell"/refer you to a Nexus One. CBW even has a couple N1's on display in their premiere display case, and a rep even asked me about what ROM I used on my N1, and said he used CyanogenMod on his.
Does each carrier post source to their builds so I can modify what the phone came with?
The carriers aren't the ones writing the software; you'd have to talk with HTC, Motorola, Samsung about that. Some carriers make specific requests, like Sprint putting their NASCAR app on, or Verizon's exclusive Skype app, but that's an app, not Android.
Have ANY of you built Android from source and used that on your phone? How did it work out?
I've had multiple attempts over the past couple years to build my own Android ROM, most recently with Cyanogen's mass of repos on Github, but either I wasn't looking in the right spot, or there wasn't enough documentation for me to figure out how to build it all on my own, so I failed on that aspect.
However, MoDaCo forum has the concept of "kitchens" where you can customize what features you want to include/exclude from various ROMs, and allows you to generate "your own" ROM that you can then flash to your phone, and I personally find this extremely attractive, even if I don't use it for myself because I like what the "vanilla" Cyanogen build includes.
All that said, you do however have multiple valid points, and I don't disagree with you on any of them.