for all those that don't see the problem...
why don't you all come back and tell us what you think when, in 2/3 years’ time (may be longer or may be sooner), you want to move to a device with a different OS, on another locked in app store.... I'll bet there will be annoyance/hesitation/an outright give up when you realise you have invested in potentially £100's worth of apps you don't want to lose or buy again....
On the console front, there aren't shiny new consoles with totally new, or significantly better hardware constantly coming out every 6-12 months - if anything, this gen (xbox 360/ps3) has been one of the longer generations so far, at least for me. Not least because the major innovations are plug in additions, like move/kinect. Not something you can do with a phone so easily. Consoles also don't suffer battery wear, physical damage, being lost on train, you being mugged for, etc, etc type issues that mobiles devices do.
and remember the general annoyance when the ps3 lost backwards compatibility? – a similar issue really.
having said all this, so many people are quite happy to spend another £40-£60 on a rehash of unreal tournament (i.e. another FPS), that it might not matter. money has to be spent on something to make the world go round...
as for the comment "If you can afford a smartphone ... the cost of a few apps shouldn't enter into it" That is a little short sighted. Let's take a parallel - 'if you can afford to buy a car, the extra 20p/litre petrol shouldn't enter into it' - well, not many would agree with that statement, would they? Spending a lot of hard-earned cash on something does not equate to not having to care about the on-going costs of running said item. And no one likes to pay for the same thing twice, unless it is a service or outright consumable like food. Put another way - things add up!
The code from a previous purchase idea is perfectly doable, technically. But commercially it is dead in the water, as this lock in is what the OS vendors love, and where is the app store cut going to come from?
Eventually, I think something similar to ‘Microsoft having to release the code/details of the windows APIs, so others can play nicely with them’ type thing will happen. i.e. the powers that be (EU commission) will step in to make things more portable.
Diatribe over.