In case you're interested, one answer to this (although not the most straightforward IMO) is to wrap a CDATA tag around all elements where spacing matters. Therefore, to get your example to work, the following would work:

DECLARE @xml nvarchar(4000)
DECLARE @h int
SET @xml = '

SO ME
DATA ]]>
'

EXECUTE sp_xml_preparedocument @h output, @xml

SELECT * FROM OPENXML(@h, '//row') WITH (id int '@id', note nvarchar(2000) 'text()')

execute sp_xml_removedocument @h