The missing part of the story is the cost of the service plan. The old style of owning a phone after two years had you paying for it via a higher service rate...with the sneaky detail that the rate did not decrease when the phone was fully paid for. If the Sprint and T-Mobile plans are $20/mo cheaper than the subsidy/pay to own plans, then they are mostly fair deals.

I like the trend of removing phone cost from the rate plan. If consumers see the true cost of phones, maybe the manufacturers will stop being able to charge such obscene markups.