exactly have the same issue!
I exactly have the same issue here!! been trying all ways read in the forums, apple support, yahoo answers. The imessage keeps showing "An error occured during activation. Try again. and then again it freezes to waiting for activation...forever. And when I turn airplane mode off, then it says Activation unsuccessful and so on it repeats itself again to the error message when I turn imessages on and off.
I've been trying to sign out and in again with the apple id, and the one in the icloud with no luck. I guess this is an official bug of ios7? Just read a new thread telling to backup, restore and resync with the itunes. The problem is my iphone4 is synced with my PC at home, while I'm working using a macbook Air now. Can I just back the phone up in this mac and restore it without losing any files?
I'm afraid about the difference in the file system. Any help would be appreciated, thank you