The fact remains, for all this openness you have vanishingly small amount of control over your own device. If you don't want Verizon's market and if you certainly don't want it "prominently displayed" you may end up being out of luck.
That's not what Verizon has done, though. I bought a Droid 2 from them recently, and when I first started up there was a question about V.Cast which I said no to (because I knew everything there would cost money that I didn't want to spend) and I wound up with the Android Marketplace icon on my home page and the V.Cast app buried in my app list. If I want to check it out it's there, if I don't I don't have to click on it. Same goes for the other apps that cam pre-installed, which mostly aren't even that bad. I did go and re-organize most of my home pages, including getting rid of things like the Fox News widget, but that's just customizing. At no point did I really feel constrained by running Verizon's rom.
Of course, I am paying $20/month for tethering on top of my unlimited data plan. The phone by itself is unlimited, but when other devices connect through it I'm limited to 2GB/month before ungodly data rates kick in. For now I'm saving it for emergencies, but so far the web browser and email connectivity are good enough that I don't think I'll even need tethering, so I'll probably cancel it.
