What I don't understand is why Apple keeps chasing their tail to lock down ringtones. Fine, they want more revenue, and they probably have the record companies breathing down their necks.
But people who are willing to pay for ringtones and the convenience of creating and implementing them via iTunes (and that's quite a lot of people) will continue to pay for them, regardless of the availability of hacks and workaround apps. Some people are meticulously moral and some can't be bothered to hack. We tend to forget that the majority of iPhone users probably never even think to hack their phone, or poke around sites like Macrumors to discover workarounds. They fire up iTunes, and use its features as-is.
Conversely, people who are unwilling to pay for ringtones will continue to find ways not to.
Does Apple really think they'll convert non-paying ringtone users into paying ones via software coercion? Do they really think every soccer mom and dad will flock to iToner and makeiphoneringtone just because it exists? Most of those people have no idea how to use an audio editor, how to loop a section of a song, how to export it, etc, or have the time to do it.
If Apple spent as much time and effort on cut n' paste, Flash, MMS, etc. as they have attempting to keep ringtones locked down, we might have those functions by now.
