I hope 3D printers make this situation better. If robot owners can print broken components that manufacturers stopped producing, they are able to repair their pets by their own. Of course, companies have to open their products information though.
I could imagine that having open "intelligence" specifications, would allow transferring the "soul" (as perceived from the owner) of a pet to another, while still mantaining a similar outlook, in order to mantain affective identification.
That, and of course, many other things. I wonder how complex is to build a robot (for a small company), which would still make it realistic enough to create an affective bond. If not too complex, 3D printing would be realistic.
People seem to be hard wired to anthropomorphize anything remotely resembling animal behavior in 3D space. If you can develop trained or environment-reactive specific, repeatable actions (especially useful or amusing ones), along with some narrow-parameter randomized responses (within or adjacent to actions), and migrate those database contents to another robotics platform seamlessly, then you'd really have something.
Kinda surprised this type of thing is still in the 'fizzled' category.
One difference here is that the critters have 'personality' which is developed over time and stored onboard somewhere in flash or eeprom. You'd need to find a way to back up or dump that data easily enough that everyone could do it regularly, because once it breaks it might be too late.
It's akin to preserving not only the arcade game, but also the high-scores table from your particular cabinet.
[1] http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_5997_-_en_-_...