The real question is whether it would have cost them $170 million to leave the OtherOS feature alone. Lets not forget Sony started the fight with the community by removing a feature originally provided on the hardware that was used heavily by researchers and programmers at home. Then the community found a way to root the PS3, then they patched it, then the root keys were found, then they started blocking rooted consoles from the network, then the network was taken down for everyone.
The community is big, Sony is small, and there are enough fringe elements in the community to make us dangerous as a whole. Hopefully they've learned their lesson and begin behaving in a more cooperative manner with the community, but I have a feeling they're just going to raise the stakes even further.