Hopefully, this will be the last to be said on the matter, but as I've began following the nikon-adobe-raw saga I feel I ought to at least finish on an intelligent considered note. Fortunately this has been done for me, through an interview with dave coffin, author of the GPL'd dcraw (a free raw convertor), who, as someone who has reverse engineered nearly all of the camera raw formats out there, has something to say about the matter. He also refers to this article which is an article about the economics of the hardware/software industries and their various battles. Its very well written and, for me, quite enlightening.

(As a side note, I downloaded dcraw several nights ago, and have started to tinker. I'll report back when I'm done).