I just don't get you, antwill.
You come from Australia - the same country which in its supreme court got modchips declared
legal when Sony threw one of its riotous bitch-fits as well, because of a very simple reasoning... Sony was deliberately delaying or disallowing games of interest to be playable there due to arbitrary region-locking, which is something those devices are able to get around.
Your legal system had the balls to stand up to this company and put its foot down in the interest of its citizens, and yet you seek to defend them because of one dude in New Jersey felt the need to share an arbitrarily long number to the world... A number that, on its own, does nothing for the casual end user, and despite whatever Sony Corporate would like people to think, is
NOT - repeat, NOT - illegal to know?
You should be commending him, if for nothing else but to at least be a figurehead... without such a daft move, we simply wouldn't have seen the ball rolling along for CFW's that enable a perma-jailbreak mode as quickly without. I'm not saying someone else couldn't have done it... but what I am saying is that I at least commend him and his efforts for getting homebrew to work on the console... GOOD homebrew, too.
And your wishes for a guy that basically just un-neutered the ps3's ability to "do everything", definitely come off very... wrong.
I just don't get you, man.