I've been thinking to why do they go to such measures to lock the software in the hardware. And have no idea. They're hardware manufacturer. Unless the software manufacturer forces them to.

It's like if I bought DELL laptop and found out that there is a chip installed that protects the installed Windows OS from replacing by other OS. There's no DELL interest in this - they sold me the hardware already. Only the OS manufacturer has interest in not allowing me to replace the OS.