This isn't just market segmentation. It's a frustrating, recurring theme among Japanese hardware manufacturers where great products are negatively impacted or outright hamstrung by shit software support. I run into it in embedded firmware and industrial controls all the time. I think it's a side effect of the corporate culture there, which is how it manages to cut into multiple market segments. Having to pass on good offerings because the software is too bad to stomach feels bad.
I get what your saying but how is their artificial firmware limitations different than Apple's own market segmentation practices? Or Google's? Or Microsoft's? Or Hashicorp? Or Docker?
It isn't different, but it's also not a clear comparison. Some differences are based on binning and calibration for example. Take sensors, silicon, power systems etc. which are all imperfect. Some product variation exists on purpose, while others are mostly just as a side-effect from the production yields.
Some segmentation is a bit extreme (Windows Pro etc. can use gpedit but Windows non-Pro can't...), while others are a matter of paying for a service rather than a thing. (i.e. Terraform FOSS locally vs. Terraform Enterprise in the cloud - you actually get a different product with different capabilities, not the same product with different things 'cut off')
Perhaps Intel is a good example in the hardware realm; some chipset and ECC variations are choices that are purely made so that server usage is highly discouraged. I would guess that some of that is simply a side-effect of R&D cost: you can't really have consumers foot the bill for extreme R&D, but you also can't make better chips without a very costly R&D process. So they might have selected a segment they know they can squeeze and put the specific features only in products for that segment. (One could argue that another perspective might be 'server' CPUs subsidising 'consumer' CPUs)
It's not always as simple as 'fake barriers for no reason', but because sometimes it really is, it gets hard to distinguish with is really annoying.
I think the frustrating thing is they can (potentially) afford much less to fund a competent software team, so the end product is much less than it could be. Which is unfortunate because of how good the hardware is.
