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Now to add a few more hours to the day so I can do so.
I suspect that people "tend to gravitate towards closed, tethered systems — like the iPhone, Tivo or Kindle" not because they are closed and tethered but because they "just work".
Take for example the iMac and OSX. Apple has a reputation of being easy to use and just working but the secret is that they only have to build an os and the associated drivers for a very finite number of hardware pieces.
TiVo is the same way. The entire system is closed using proprietary hardware and software that were designed to a)minimize hardware expense and b)work together but only on that hardware. TiVo designed it to do what it does and only what it does. It isn't open to tinkering but by the same token the steps to using it are 1) remove from box 2)plug into wall 3) turn on. Done! No configuring of codecs or server addresses or compression algorithms. There's no question about finding the right driver for the video capture card or which TV listing service to use.
The reality is, for a vast majority of the population, tinkering is something negative about an item. Most people don't relish the thought of purchasing a car body and then having to install the engine before they can drive it. A select few do, hence the whole "kit car" industry but the rest are content with walking into a showroom and driving a new car away. Sure you can change the rims and tint the windows, but really this is analogous to changing wallpaper and themes in your OS. The underlying engine is still the same.
Just my unsolicited $.02