The piracy hacks never used OtherOS. The first piracy hack (the PSJailbreak dongle exploit) simply exploited the GameOS usb stack and wasn't released until after OtherOS had already been removed in a firmware update.
The only hack that ever targeted OtherOS was a complex memory glitching attack that was pretty hard to pull off. As far as I'm aware, that hack was only ever used by a few people for dumping memory, and those dumps were reverse engineered to find other exploits.
If anything, OtherOS might have slowed PS3 modding efforts down, as modders were wasted years banging their heads against the reasonably secure hypervisor. Turns out, GameOS had minimal security, and once you gained kernel access, you could boot backups without needing to touch the hypervisor.
Though that was very much a team effort, I knew nothing about USB before working on that. From memory, my contribution was mostly tweaking the code until it worked, I think my PS3 was the first to be exploited by PSGroove.
Though, I wasn't happy at merely copying the sequence of packets USB that lead to an exploit, so I spent some time trying to get a better understanding of how the exploit worked. That document is the result of my efforts.
But it was a pretty hard exploit to pull off, the required pulse was pretty short and required getting lucky. Nobody ever developed it into something particularly useful for end users, and it didn't directly enable piracy.
While I suspect the unknown person who developed the PSJailbreak exploit did use that attack as a stepping stone towards hacking GameOS, it was not a requirement. And it also could have been done from GameOS once you had kernel level code executing there.
Notably, the PS3 at launch was actually cheaper than some dedicated Blu-ray players, so some home theater enthusiasts bought them (few to no games), eating into Sony's revenue even more. It took several years for the PS3 to be profitable, but it won the format war.
It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded.
Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So by the time they had ramped up the capacity to make enough to meet PS3 demand, there were several years of worse/less performant PS3 versions of games developed for multiple platforms, making Sony's console look worse. It would have been a tough sell internally for the PS4 to use a custom processor architecture again, so they opted not to. This must have soured Sony's opinion of the Cell processor overall.
Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell and special ways to squeeze out performance.
It has some details on the awkward position the IBM developers were put in.
Rodrigo Copetti's excellent articles on the PS3[1] and Xbox 360 [2]
and Ars' Hannibal's article on the Xenon Chip. [3]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6056634
[1] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/
From the wiki: "The introductory design is fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process, with initial volume production slated for IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York."
AMD did this for Intel up to the 286. Sony should have insisted upon a tidal wave of wafers, if needed.
It was more than a tax dodge.
CEOs like tax dodges and plausible deniability.
It came with yabasic on a demo disk, that's what qualified it as a computer for the eu tax break.
ps2linux was chronologically irrelevant to your claim AIUI...
PS2Linux was the next iteration of Net Yaroze from Playstation 1.
That was my workstation for a student job. It had a MIPS R3000.
DEC probably would have lasted longer if they had bought MIPS instead of sinking all the effort into Alpha (and PRISM before it).