I thought this was an interesting tidbit to come across today, with Sony announcing that the PS3 model released in Europe will be a different one than the one in the Japanese and North American markets.  Specifically, it won't have the backwards compatibility chip that implements the BC feature in hardware.  Now, aside from the business implications of releasing the PS3 into the European market late, more expensive, and with fewer features, it asks some interesting questions about the future of the platform.

Removing that chip is clearly a cost cutting move -- quite strategically important.  So that implies that future revisions in the other territories may follow suit.  Now at that point, you have two different models of PS3s floating around, ones that use hardware BC and ones that do it in software.  If you're Sony, do you really want to support two different BC pathways?  Probably not.  So most likely, you disable the hardware BC on the older machines via a firmware update an enforce software BC.

Now, I don't think this is necessarily the disaster that the fan boards proclaim it to be, if the software BC is good it has the potential to be a good deal better than the hardware version (though I'm not holding my breath).  But does Sony have the right to disable actual hardware features in a game system I already own?  That seems like dangerous legal territory to tread in...