But they don't own the iOS App Store. People want to move goalposts and say we're arguing about what you can do with your phone but we're really arguing about a store policy.

And if these people wanted to buy a phone that had lots of app stores available I think we're all in agreement that they fucked up if they bought the iphone.

Actually you just moved the goalposts from "do as they please with their own device" to "do as they please in some non-public space that they do not own".

Because we're really explicitly NOT arguing about a store policy. If it was just a store policy there would not be this argument.

For instance, say Virgin does not want to sell some CD with deeply offensive lyrics. They probably make those decisions every day. Nobody complains.

However, it would stop being just a store policy, if a large part of the public would only have a CD Player that can exclusively play CDs that Virgin approves of. Get the difference? And that part of the argument doesn't even involve general purpose computing.

When the store is the only way for ordinary users to load software, the store policy and what you can realistically do with your phone is the same thing.