Hey, Windows Phone 7 users! Dying to load your handset up with all sorts of crazy, customized ROMs like your Android-carrying brothers-from-another-mother? Well, you still can't but today, the hacking community got one giant step closer!
You see, Windows Phone 7 handsets are pretty protective of their innards. If you start tinkering with the works, the Windows Genuine Advantage (or WGA) security fires off and the handset goes into lockdown. As always, in comes the community over at XDA-dev to save the day. Hacker ansar.ath.gr has figured out a way to pull the "imgfs.bin" file (which contains most of the system files, but none of the radio/frequency/baseband stuff that you probably don't want to change) from one handset and load it onto another, without WGA sounding the alarm. So, what does this mean for you? Right this second, not a ton. It may very well be the first stepping stone to customized ROMs. More immediately, however, it looks like WP7 handsets can be flashed with ROMs from other carriers without totally borking the important bits that's good news for you if you managed to pick the one carrier that chose to load the handset up with a bunch of crap
I don't think crapware is a problem. As far as I can tell, you can uninstall all carrier and OEM software because they are just like any other apps (as opposed to forced & locked in, i.e. Android).
Granted, there are non-root apps on the Android market to hide them, which is essentially all you're doing when you uninstall them. Don't believe me? Reset your phone to factory. Oh hey, how'd that get installed again?