As opposed to a sandboxed device? Yes. Someone who wants the freedom to write code, install VMs, test browsers, compile C, you name it, no, they do _not_ want a little sandboxed device. The college student at Starbucks typing a term paper? sure.
You can do all of those things with OSX. This whole discussion doesn't make sense because you can do pretty much whatever you want outside of the app store ecosystem.
