1187001 Sony showed a willingness for homebrew on PS3 (for financial gain though)
agreed as tinman said the bottom line is all that matters and that applies to both the developers and manufacturers. GPU access is restricted for that very reason, so that developers pay sony for unrestricted hardware access rather than just develop games using the Linux OS without paying them a dime. I think the only difference is who's rules you have broken and who you didn't pay for a given privilege.