Officially unlocked iPhones in France - the reality

As France is currently the only country where Apple allows the iPhone to be sold without a contract and unlocked, I thought I would share my experience since purchasing an iPhone in November of last year.
Living in France and deciding I needed the unlimited data option, I opted to buy the iPhone with a contract, and then unlock it right away as I do travel on business to the UK quite often. First and foremost, Orange offer a 12 and 24 month contract - albeit for a few Euros more for 12 months (which is what I ended up going for). Incidentally, Orange recently introduced a business option for the iPhone which comes in at €339 and €29.90 per month for 24 months. The cost to unlock the iPhone came in at €100 as advertised.
The unlocking process involved a call to Orange customer services followed by a confirmation letter within 5 days. To summarise, Orange send the IMEI number of my iPhone to Apple which I assume is stored so that when my iPhone syncs with iTunes, it knows to "unlock" my phone. Typically, other phones only require an unlock code to be entered directly into the phone.
Once unlocked, I inserted my Three UK SIM card which promptly came back with an "invalid SIM" error. I immediately called Orange who assured me the phone should work with any SIM. You may recall that for a few weeks after the launch, there were reports that the French unlocked iPhones would be restricted to French SIM cards only. I phoned Apple in France to confirm this and they suggested this may be the case. To be honest, the lady who tried to help me just didn't know and suggested the reports on the Internet were probably true. Not giving up, I called Three and explained the problem I had. After some discussion, it was revealed that Three UK SIM cards will only work in 3G enabled phones - which explained the error on the iPhone. They advised this was intentional and they could not help me further. I subsequently cancelled my Three UK account and purchased an O2 Pay-As-You-Go SIM card. I popped this into my iPhone, and it registered correctly. At this point, the firmware was at 1.1.2 - and important to note that I could swap between SIM cards at will without an issue.
MacWorld came and went, along with firmware 1.1.3. I upgraded straight away and when I attempted to swap the Orange SIM for the UK SIM, no signal registered on the phone. Further investigation on the Internet revealed reports of officially unlocked phones no longer working with "foreign" SIM cards. I decided to sync it to iTunes and restore the firmware. I never got that far thankfully. As soon as iTunes picked up the fact that the SIM was different, it popped up a dialogue (in English) to say my phone was now unlocked. The iPhone worked fine from that point onward. I popped the Orange SIM back in and once again, no signal. Syncing the iPhone with iTunes fixed the problem, this time with the "unlocked" message appearing in French. For reasons only known to Apple, in 1.1.3 they decided to make the inter-operability of SIMs much more difficult and impractical. I therefore need to have access not only to my Mac, but also the Internet just to change my Orange SIM to the UK one. I am not happy about this and have complained to Apple France as it is my view that an unlocked phone is an unlocked phone. Once the process completes once, I should not have to keep "authorising" the phone every time I swap my SIM card.
As for unofficially unlocked phones, this is not an issue of course. One question yet to be answered is what happens when your 12 or 24 month contract expires? Do Apple then unlock your iPhone? Will it suffer from the same SIM changing issues as I have outlined above? For now, we don't know.