Just a couple of points of order. Please mind that I speak as a Droid 1 owner who is nonetheless a pretty hardcore enthusiast.
Generally, all Launchers except manufacturer-themed ones can share widgets and wallpapers with ease. As Brian mentioned, HTC’s SenseUI and Motorola’s Blur (along with Samsung’s less invasive Touchwiz and whatever Sony is calling theirs these days) do come with a pretty hefty bevy of custom-designed widgets that rely on deep hooks in the Android code that these “enhancements” have grafted on. Once you move away from the company-specific UI, you lose access to all that.
The widgets you download from the market and that come with “standard” apps (un-modified by the manufacturer) will work across all launchers. The occasional launcher will offer unique widgets as an extra (LauncherPro’s paid version includes several fancy ones), but these are effectively the same as paid widgets: there if you buy them.
All of which may not matter much if you’ve fallen in love with the Sense or Blur ways of doing things, of course, but I don’t want you to think that switching homescreens immediately means losing everything you’ve ever loved about the phone.
Furthermore, keep in mind that the Droid X (as well as its brothers the Droid 2 and Droid Pro) feature locked bootloaders featuring Motorola’s custom eFuse protection system. These bootloaders check the integrity of the /system folder each boot and, more importantly, ensure that only a Motorola-signed kernel boots each power-on.
What this largely means is that hardcore modding is somewhere between difficult and impossible. ROMs (that is, new versions of the Android OS developed by hackers/modders) that run on these latter-day Motorola devices rely on a variety of tricks (albeit time-tested, reliable tricks) to overlay a new /system image after eFuse performs its checks. As such, you normally have to rely on a bootstrapping application and will oftentimes need to “reboot” twice rather than once to switch ROMs (once to load the signed files, and a second, “soft” boot to overlay the new ROM’s payload).
Furthermore, you can only engage in activities that the included kernel supports. If there’s some CPU clockspeed you want to access that the kernel doesn’t have, you’re out of luck. If there’s some device you want to hook up but lack drivers for, you’re also liable to be out of luck (AKA, thank God for non-Sense ROMs on HTC phones, so those poor bastards can use Wiimotes). Essentially, you will have control over many aspects of your phone, but certain very low-level functions will be off-limits.
Of course, you get access to fun apps. . . Titanium Backup can backup any app on the phone, store your text messages and settings across multiple ROMs, and generally save your butt. Wireless tether does exactly what it says at absolutely no charge to you. Drocap and the related apps let you easily take screenshots and save them to the SD card. SetCPU lets you control your CPU speed with advanced profiles that can trigger on numerous conditions (battery life, temperature, etc.), although you’ll be limited to speeds allowed by your kernel. ROM Manager can automate many ROM-flashing and NAND-backup-making functions for your recovery to assist in all your modding derring-do. Root explorer lets you fiddle around with system files while the phone is booted without use of a computer.
If you’re a tinkerer, rooting is fantastic. For most of the modern phones it is NOT required to have a great, fast, and enjoyable experience. . . but if you want absolute ownership of your device, it is very empowering. It’s a real pity what Motorola’s done with the bootloader, but the Android modding community has come out in force for the DroidX/2/Pro, crafting Blur-free ROMs and ensuring that newer versions of Android are backported to those devices even before Motorola/Verizon officially release updates.
P.S. - I also started writing all this an hour ago and then got distracted by the Craig Ferguson Doctor Who special. I have no idea if some of what I’ve covered here’s been said by others in the interim :)
