You can hear Tim Cook's speech here or check out MacDailyNews's generally accurate notes on the presentation. But I wanted to up the ante with some direct quotes about the unlocking issue and the SDK. Here are some of the best quotes - find the full context (i.e. much longer quotes) after the jump.

"There will always be some level of hacking, there will always be a case where somebody wants to run on a different carrier. However in the US, what we see is very few that we can tell of people that bought a phone to unlock it and use it on a carrier in the US other than AT&T."

"In the US, our fundamental choice was do we want to develop two phones, a CDMA phone and a GSM phone? and we didn't."

[regarding carrier exclusivity] "Now, are we married to this model? Will we do that everywhere? We're not married to any business model."

Tim Cook on the SDK:

A: It's important to realize that very few companies in the world know how to build a platform. You can really count them on a very few fingers. And Apple's one of them. We've had the Mac platform for years and really understand this. and so when we started with the phone, we started by getting developers to focus on web 2.0 apps. There's over a thousand of these today, and there's probably many people in this room that are using many of these. But people also want to do more than that. And as we got into the phone more and more, it became clear to us that we should release an SDK and we're going to talk about that more next week at our event. But in essence what it does, is it will make the product even more compelling and this is a product that has the highest customer sat[isfaction] of any Apple product ever shipped which is a very very high bar and so we're super excited about where this can take us.

Q: Do you have any idea of when the first third party apps might actually be rolling out?

A: We're going to go into some more details next week at the press event and I don't want to take away the element of surprise.

Tim Cook on unlocking:

A: The demand for the iPhone is so intense in the markets where we aren't officially selling it, that people are exporting it out of the US in many different ways and then running it on local carriers in countries where we're not officially selling it. You know, the thing that I like about that is it shows there's a lot of worldwide demand. and I think the most important thing for Apple by far in this first 8-10 months or so of selling in the phone world was to deliver a product that would delight customers. And again, with the customer sat ratings, we're doing that and we're going to be adding to that as we talk about really getting at some of the enterprise questions people have been raising and opening up the platform for more developers etc it's only going to get better and so I think that's the real thing some people view as an issue.

There will always be some level of hacking, there will always be a case where somebody wants to run on a different carrier. However in the US, what we see is very few that we can tell of people that bought a phone to unlock it and use it on a carrier in the US other than AT&T. This isn't what's happening at the macro level. What's happening is people in all of these countries around the world that wish we were selling are finding ways to get the phone in their country. And so of all the problems that I might face, this is one that I face looking at with a little bit of a smile because it means there's great demand for the phone and to have people stepping over each other to get the phone isn't a bad thing.

Q: Is there any way you can track these phones at all so you can maybe reprioritize which countries you launch?

A: As you might guess, we are in conversations with many carriers because we re going to roll out more European countries this year, we are going to enter Asia this year, we're talking to many carriers and were getting some level of information about iPhones on their network. but it's very hard to piece all of this together because we're also finding cases where as an example I give you an iPhone for Christmas - I didn't by the way - but if I did, you might not activate it until your contract is up. and so we're finding that phones bought in December might be activated in January or February. And of course we're new at this as well, and so it's very hard to say precisely how many phones are exiting etc - we believe it's significant based on what we can tell, but we're still seeing phones that we sold in Septemeber being activated last quarter as well and so we've got more to learn here to be precise.

Q: Now, given that we're at eight months into this, a lot of it's been a learning process for the company. Can you give us an update on your thinking about the benefits of going with one carrier versus multiple carriers in each country?

A: It's a good question, yeah. In the US, our fundamental choice was do we want to develop two phones, a CDMA phone and a GSM phone? and we didn't. We wanted to do the simplest approach in the beginning because that's the fastest way to learn and so we wanted a GSM, GSM is the worldwide standard, and AT&T is the largest carrier, and the business relationship that we could work with AT&T allowed Apple to be Apple and AT&T to be AT&T and this is the power of this relationship I think. And so we feel very good about that. We went into Europe and we picked the top carrier in each of those three countries and got going in those countries. Now, are we married to this model? Will we do that everywhere? We're not married to any business model. What we're married to is shipping the best phone in the world and continuing every day to innovate in making it better and moving it from a device to a platform. we are married to that. but it's obviously when you look at some of these international markets, you find that the markets are very different. You might find one where there's no postpaid business or minimal. That might need a different business model. You might find one where being exclusive might not be in our best interests and so I'm not announcing what we will or won't do, I'm announcing that we're going to intelligently think about each one and just decide what's best for the company to do. And I will tell you, there is no shortage of interest in the iPhone by the carriers.

We will roll out more geo[graphie]s, I do believe that is the most important thing we can do in this hacking world, even more important than we'll take other actions on software and the rest, we'll have a series of actions, but most importantly, we need to offer the phone in more places, and we're going to do that this year.