I emailed
dan@sprint.com yesterday with a pretty ominous sounding email about the power-user community being pretty upset about it and they feel cheated & used by how Sprint implied that we would get an upgrade on launch. I mentioned that the rumor was early 2010 and if it were true, that was unacceptable. Got a response today from someone and they sounded a little concerned and wanted to talk about it and wanted my number. I replied back saying (without implicating sources) that we already knew there was an upgrade rom from HTC ready to go and it had been leaked, but in such a way that we can't use it. I used that to call them out on any excuse of not having one to release.
We'll see if they respond.
I've got a problem with "paper launches" and this was most definitely that. I'm sure Microsoft wasn't thrilled about the number of handsets on store shelves after they coordinated a global release.