This was a resolution. They were only banning their own dial telephones.

One of the problems with Sprint and Verizon is that the radio has to be specifically designed for them

What about the radio needs to be carrier-specific? An EV-DO radio is an EV-DO radio.

The big US carriers are guilty of crippling, but it's got nothing to do with the air interface or the hardware. In the CDMA world, the same exact hardware is, more often than not, sold outside the US without crippled software. In fact, sometimes they're even sold as such inside the US, by smaller carriers that can't afford to heavily customize (cripple) the software.