This was my immediate reaction as well.

I want to love SONY products. But for the past decade, it seems as if they actively try to piss their users off by building a perfectly good product and then crippling it with arbitrary vendor-specific lock-in.

Remember ATRAC for Minidiscs? If I recall correctly, Sony's first flash-memory music players tried to force you to use ATRAC instead of MP3.

I wonder if this lock-in makes sense in the local Japanese market and it's simply a matter of poor international understanding. Or if their local market gets similarly annoyed.