An awful lot of work to get an unlocked iPhone

Go to Vietnam and they will disassemble it. [Link]

If you want an unlocked 3G iPhone, you have a couple options. If you haven't upgraded to 2.2, you can try your luck with one of those SIM piggyback wafers; otherwise, you can try importing from a country like Hong Kong, which sells unlocked iPhones officially.

There's a third option, though: take a trip to Hanoi, for 1.2 million dong (snicker! Also: about $80) you can have your iPhone 3G physically unlocked by an industrious Vietnamese mobile phone hacker.