I dislike it when manufactures do this to a product that has been sold to you; but doing things like this have been around for a bit.
IBM did it for a long time with their mainframes. We called IBM up to order additional memory for one of the 390's we had, guy comes out and insert a jumper and then leaves. We just spent a few thousand dollars for a jumper! It was already installed because it was cheaper for IBM to install it in machines when they were first build than to field install it at a later date. They figured out that most customers would eventually order memory upgrades at a later data anyway. I could almost see the reasoning in this type of case were they were adding actual additional hardware to a machine, then playing with the odds that enough customers would order memory upgrades to offset the cost of installing it into all their machines at time of manufacture.
In Intel case though, there are no two types of chips. Its one chip that comes with parts turned off that allow them to charge money to remove the block. Its like buying a car with the throttle that can open only half way, then charging you to remove the throttle block allowing it go to full open.
