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There was no reason they couldn’t have sold a slightly less locked-down system to researchers at a higher price point —- Microsoft did exactly that with unsold X360 Kinect units (and bundled in a USB adapter) for medical research.

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Cell processor shipped for commercial installation in the IBM Blades QS20/QS21/QS22, which was based on Roadrunner supercomputer.

Sony also demoed rack-mount with Cell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zego) but it is not clear that it was available in open market

The reason was cost. Have fun convincing management to allocate resources to develop and support another SKU tailored for researchers.

So what? Don't need much difference in hardware, it was only a firmware change.

Firmware changes that relax the security of your hardware require a lot of red tape and raise much fear in management.

SONY is infamous for going overboard on DRM.

It is time and not a priority.

A lot of things can be done given unlimited time and resources, but unfortunately we don’t have that.

You don't need to - just license it out to a third-party systems integrator.

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