Eh, surely just not putting the Orange homescreen SW on it and selling it as a "generic handset", as they do with quite a few others, would just be the answer? Is that just being too sensible?
Either way, I'm not too sure what the n73 had to offer over other recent Nokia handsets, but if Nokia can keep managing to make their handsets more difficult to customise by the operators that's fine with me! I don't want any shortcuts off my main screen, I'm happy to press the menu button and find things from there, I'm pretty sure that's why Nokia placed it there in the first place!