No, not only the checksum is affected. The entire pubkeyhash is completely different without that character. Try it yourself with https://gobittest.appspot.com/Address
D'oh! Yes, you're right. I don't know how I got so confused about how base58 works. I blame insufficient caffeine.Yep.
If he'd have replaced a character with a different character, then perhaps the pubKeyHash might have stayed the same (depending on which character position was replaced), but if you remove the final character, you are essentially dividing the entire integer by 58 (right shifting a base 58 integer on base58 position). This results in a completely different integer, and therefore a completely different pubKeyHash when you convert that integer to bytes and remove the version and last 4 bytes.
