They love to sell hardware but Apple has little to no interest in exerting real effort in the enterprise ecosystem.
I'm wrapping up a WAN deployment project for a large school district (54 schools spread over a fair sized small city). This project covers the life span from opening the box to recycling the unit and ranges from a small handful of one off systems (Mac Pros, Macbook Pros, iMacs, iPod Touches and iPads) to labs of iMacs and carts of Macbooks and iPod Touches.
I can say, without hesitation, that the amount of useful information I have received from Apple has been next to nil. 99% of the useful information available is going to be self discovered and through sites such as AFP548, MacEnterprise and a handful of mailing lists/usenet groups.
Forget Apple's laissez faire attitude to the actual realistic mechanics of deployment, we have been unable to come to solutions related to things as simple as shipping lists that include MAC addresses (especially important when deploying iPods/iPads in a network that utilizes MAC white lists on top of WPA2 for wireless access or for generating autonaming policies based on subnet and MAC address.), solutions for realistic volume licensing or any truly useful tools for deploying iOS based devices.
Once you have a system in place, you're okay; (the exception being the complete lack of bulk iOS app management, updates, etc...) But getting there is far more work and self discovery than is excusable when managing more than a hundred units, forget 1000+.
(Trust me, when you've got 300+ iPods that need to be upgraded to iOS4 and need to install a base set of apps across them, you'll seriously question the sanity of iTunes as a deployment tool and realize the absolute frustration of 1:1 policy deployment with ICU).
I absolutely groove on Apple's products; I've got a very nice MBP, an iMac on my desk, an iPod Touch and an iPad. I'm also a serious fan of OS X as a workstation environment (and find OS X Server an overall joy to implement), but Apple needs to either embrace enterprise, or officially state that they don't want the hassle.
Agreed. iPods and iPads excel in 1:1 (or even shared 1:5/10) environments. Plus, the ability for differential education strategies are most cool (especially if there's a mentality of total system lockdown on desktops/laptops/netbooks) and freeing for an instructor. Not to mention, there are some truly amazing apps out there for the educational environment.
But that part is just not true from a macro-level. I know, Macs are preferable for many users and desired by many instructors. But arguing their case and building the infrastructure to satisfy those who lay law is a serious uphill battle.
As for the actual topic at hand.
Apple is once again showing their lack of preparation for enterprise use. The truth is, this is only a very poor stop gap solution (and one offered because the alternative is frightening from the standpoint of a developer attempting to sell their software). Sure, you can only register a single device to five systems; but you can connect unlimited systems to a single deployment machine and account. ...and there's currently no app/machine count in place.
What kind of protection does that offer the developer?
/Edit
New account, because I mostly lurk and have long forgotten my account info...