>making the battery not removable ... means the new phone owners will HAVE to buy a whole new phone every few years
This bollocks again. It may not be something you can do on the train on the way home from work (which may be a desirable feature), but it is trivially easy to replace a battery yourself, or pay someone in pretty much every shopping centre or high street to do it for you.
Do you also throw out your car every time it needs a filter changed? Because that's a much harder job to do.