I'd love the ability to deploy my little learning-iPhone-SDK apps to my iPhone (to get the 'oh wow' feeling that I built something) but that's going to require $99 and getting a provisioning certificate from Apple. And in fact, I may pay the $99, just to be able to do this (not necessarily to sell apps).
I believe that Apple and MSFT did this licensing fee program to stop any sort of homebrew movement (e.g. people sharing games outside of the approved ecosystem). They came from Homebrew but that's in the Cambrian age for them.
With Android, there are no barriers at all to setting up the SDK, creating an application, and installing the application on your own phone via USB. You can even go so far as to build and distribute the .apk packages to let anyone in the world install your application on their own Android phone. In fact, if you don't care about the Market at all, you can simply release, distribute, or even sell your application on your own to customers, and they have the ability to get your app onto their phone as easily as downloading it through their Android Browser.
The only barrier comes when you want to start putting your apps on the Android Market, at which point you must become a registered Android Developer, for the cost of a whopping $25, which then allows you the ability to publish apps to the Market.
I believe that Apple and MSFT did this licensing fee program to stop any sort of homebrew movement (e.g. people sharing games outside of the approved ecosystem). They came from Homebrew but that's in the Cambrian age for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club