I dont buy the anti theft angle either. People's phones still end up stolen, and they are still contacted by the thieves to remove the icloud account. ICloud is a good enough feature to prevent theft, and having authorized repair options in it is great. So, that notion is already pretty bad. If someone replaces the motherboard with a blank iPhone(no iCloud attached), then a check of parts that are serialized to an iCloud account should be implemented to prevent harvesting parts from a locked iPhone. There are better consumer friendly methods that Apple simply ignores.