The point everyone missed who says this is a waste of time is that local telcos here do not lock the majority of their phones to a contract.

A user would *expect* any phone he/she purchase complying to the GSM standard to work with ANY of the local networks.

Another point worth looking is that telcos have agreements with other telcos to enable global roaming for all of their users (who are using many different types and brands of mobile devices) so the more devices they support, the more deals they can make to each other (this is a very simplistic correlation). So its to the benefit of perception and value that all devices are supported in one way or the other (and in this case, a phone made by Apple) so customers would gravitate towards a particular telco.

Hosting a closed network benefits no one, unless you have significant benefits or technological features (DoCoMo).