I imagine developers will produce interesting productivity software for these platforms, but I think the form factor inherently privileges consumption. There are the ergonomics, for example. Also limited screen size, and necessarily limited input. Maybe my overall point, though, is that with development going into optimizing consumption, less goes to figuring out more robust ways to interact with a more powerful platform. I feel like the desktop GUI has stagnated over the last couple of decades, and now there's less hope than ever that there's going to be any significant innovation in this vector.
It might be just an inherent lag between optimized mass consumption, and new innovative production. Scaling the Web out to the mass market happened first, next-generation innovations like Google showed up later. It is discouraging the direction is moving toward walled gardens. But there's a plus side to getting the platform out there to millions, making it more valuable to build innovations on. I can live with it as long as it's not one company owning the whole market, or a hundred small incompatible ones.
Machines optimized for creating stuff keep getting better, and aren't going away. I don't think it's necessarily bad if those machines drop to a smaller market share. It's usually a much smaller percent of people who create the apps and content that aren't crap anyway, and most of the consumer audience goes to them. Getting optimized video production machines out to the masses via cellphones is cool, but it's not really improving the average video on YouTube.
For creative ideas at the OS and interaction levels though... yeah, the platform owners need or want to own most of it. I think they're OK with jailbreaking the platform to the extent it creates a testing ground for new ideas, that they can then adopt.
