It's a reactionary move precipitated by the hacking done by that geohat guy. A lot of gaming companies think that by making a console pirate proof (which the PS3 has been so far) saves them money in the long run.

Look at the whole Ubisoft Assassin's Creed 2 mess.

In Sony's case I think they partly blame the PSP's problems on piracy and don't want it to happen to the PS3.

I wonder if they can somehow be persuaded to compromise - all future firmware updates limit the owner to running Sony's OS, but if you're prepared to forego the consumer goodies, they'll lift the hypervisor restrictions.

As a matter of act, with little or no marketing or other overheads, they could offer an open PS3 for a bit more than the consumer version (say $400), on the understanding that when you purchase it, you are not entitled to support for anything except physical hardware failure.

I'm really sad that PS3's potential as a general computing platform have not been properly realized. Of course that's partly Sony's own fault, but there has been much less interest than I expected even in the possibilities that were available. I thought the Cell offered a really interesting architecture and expected a surge of black-box applications. Oh well.