Sensational, maybe, but it's not good for PS3 owners, whether bricked is the right word or not.
From wikipedia: "In one common sense of the term, "bricking" suggests that the damage, often a misconfiguration of essential on-board software, is so serious as to have rendered the device _permanently_ unusable."
What? Your CPU burnt during the last upgrade? Not bricked! You just need to go through the simple procedure of soldering a new CPU!