Surely an Android device would have been a better choice? Jailbreaking is a kludge, it doesn't make the iPhone less encumbered from the average user's perspective.
(While a couple specific devices are open, most Android devices are closed; it does a disservice to connect the notion of "Android" with "open". Your point stands, however, with that detail fixed, although the process for setting up Debian or Ubuntu Core in a cheroot to get a nice ssh server with a decent shell and a package manager is a lot more complex than Telesphoreo on an iPhone.)
That done with, from the "average user's perspective", jailbreaking an iPhone 4 gets you more freedoms from less invested time and with less required knowledge than even a a "truly open" Nexus device: the tools are more centralized and easier to find how-tos that expect nothing more than "I sort of know enough to use YouTube", they are less technical to operate (and often even quite graphical; sometimes even having been embedded in web pages for a "slide to jailbreak‘ experience: I don't think I've ever seen a hack quite as smooth as comex's JailbreakMe 3.0), and due to Substrate it is infinitely easier to intstall the one or two custom changes you want rather than thinking about choosing and installing a custom version of the entire OS or having to screw around with risky patch files or incredibly complex baksmali instructions.
Surely an Android device would have been a better choice? Jailbreaking is a kludge, it doesn't make the iPhone less encumbered from the average user's perspective.