It’s not anything more than a rumor right now, but reports are floating around claiming that “select developers” are already receiving prerelease versions of the upcoming iPhone SDK. The kit is said to already be producing native apps, and development is being compared to other sandboxed APIs like Google’s OpenSocial — apps have “clear limits” on what they can do, and interactions with the OS are mediated, presumably to avoid any security or performance issues. That jives with what Steve-O said about managing access, but again — this is all just a steamy cloud of vaporous nothing till that first app shows up in iTunes.