I guess it depends on what we mean by 'opening up the hood.' Sticking to the analogy I would take that to mean cracking open the physical case. Most of the 'black boxes' in a cars engine are also protected with various DRM methods to make it illegal for others to reverse-engineer them (therefore making it so that mechanics have to pay the manufacturer for access to the devices). I would associate those with the actual chips inside of the iPad/iPhone as well as the OS.
