Frankenstein iPhones
It may be pressure from the likes of ebay/phone carrriers too, there are plenty of Frankenstein iPhones out there that get resold/refurbished/returned, causing claims.
These Frankenstein 'iPhones' look, for all intensive purposes like an iPhone, but are made up of cheap copy parts/parts from other iPhones, cheap chinese copy headphone jacks, buttons, data cables, replacement cameras, digitisers, screens, batteries, its very difficult to tell without pulling the iPhone apart.
Its a minefield, when you start to include the fact that a carrier can block the iPhone if a user fails to keep up the 2 year contract and sells the handset, a user fails to deregister their iPhone account password or the user marks/reports it as stolen, after its sold on.
Anyone buying an iPhone secondhand from anyone other than a reputable source is playing with fire. Its just not worth the hassle.
Its sounds a bit like early Windows Activation Problems. Early on, it was heavy handed - it prevented you logging on. Feedback to MS, changed it a nag/notification/black screen - much better.
Something simple like showing iPad/iPhone in red in the corner rather than white would be reasonable, so its easy to see at a glance if an iPhone is 'genuine' internally, and doesn't distract too much, inconvenience the user, but shows you have a Genuine iPhone internally/
Biting the hand that feeds IT
