Ail on 29 March 2010
Sony added that feature at the beginning to make the part of the community that usually hacks a system to do other stuff happy...( not the pirates but all the others that just want to play with technical stuff like a new processor).Pirates usually base their work on what those guys find out and by removing those guys from the equation Sony made the pirate works a lot harder...
The way the PS3 was originally set up, all those guys were happily playing on Linux and didn't contribute to the pirates efforts in breaking the PS3 for gaming purpose. Which is why the PS3 remained unhacked for so long.
So that feature served its purpose...
PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !
PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !
