Glad I didn't buy one. If I had bought one and it did that to me I'd actually sabotage our AWS spend on purpose just to punish Bezos.
As pointed in the article, the move to monetization happened once the writing was on the wall that it wouldn´t become significantly different than what we have now.
Also they´ve always been priced so aggressively, I´m kinda glad I got the original puck at such a low price, to see first hand where the technology was and what to expect from it.