[mikeash]

OK, but we're not actually talking about desktop PCs, but iOS devices. There are no drivers to install. There are almost no device-wide settings at all. Exceptions would be OS updates and stuff like Find My iPhone. Easy solution there: allow one and only one "owner" account to touch them.

The idea that keyboard localization should be system-wide is weird. Different people can speak and write different languages. Although it should be a non-issue, since a single person can speak and write multiple languages, and switching keyboards should be trivial.

Anyway, you can come up with scenarios where my "make it act like a fresh device" idea is inadequate. But my idea is still an absolute improvement over what we have now, and would be perfectly good for a lot of uses. You're describing a bunch of stuff you want but that is by no means required, and then using the complexity of that stuff to say that the whole feature is a bad idea. It doesn't make a lot of sense.