I also doubt it will prevent the use of 'legacy glass'. If there's one thing my experience with Sony mounts has taught me, -somebody- will make an adapter. Yes, it may involve another element or two in the path to rectify. But I would be -shocked- if Sony didn't have a path here; a decent amount of e-mount adoption has been thanks to the adaptability of the system, and my guess is they can easily price this in a product where they can make money without worrying about attach rate (how many lenses the consumer buys).
As far as using legacy glass: Sony don't have medium format glass. At all. They've never built a medium format camera under their own name, and Minolta last made medium format in the 60s. Again, the grandparent hot take, and the upvotes, are coming from people who know zero about photography.
Either Sony are going to get into the medium format market for the first time (which seems unlikely to me, but you never know), or this is a sensor design for one or more of their MF customers (i.e. all the remaining medium format manufacturers - Hassleblad, Phase One, Pentax, and Fujifilm). I'd expect that if it's the latter there will either be adapters, or electronic compensation.
A curved image plane is more associated with box cameras like the Ansco Pioneer or with pinhole cameras, to either reduce curvature of field or vignetting. Most likely the curved sensor will reduce the complexity of the lens since it removes the necessity of creating a flat field.
It's certainly possible that Sony won't make their own camera, but will instead sell sensors to other manufacturers just as they do with APS-c sensors.
Someone was just explaining to me that the reason apple did M1 chips was so they could bake DRAM on to make it hard to upgrade DRAM on the macbook air. Ignore that Apple could have blocked that in a lot of much more inexpensive ways.
If sony wants to prevent legacy glass, they can do a little verifier chip in glass (that they don't actually make BTW) just like HP does with ink cartridges etc. They don't need to design a curved sensor to lock out stuff if they wanted (I don't see why they would care, they sell sensors not glass).
* Sony opens their E mount design to third party lens makers like Tamron, Tokina, Cosina, Sigma, etc
* Sony makes an adapter to mount legacy A-mount lenses
More lenses is a great plus when it comes to selling cameras.
Not that I don't agree with you in general, but that seems like a great way to tank sales and burn good-will. HP can get away with it because people don't do research and might actually believe that it's to protect the printer (or whatever). People that are buying thousand dollar cameras might be less amused.