>

That's a great counter example and perfectly reasonable!  
I think the fear I have, and others share, is that once this is the norm, the paywalled on hardware feature will no longer be something subsidized by the premium user, but something gated for pure profit and nothing else.
This is truly an unpopular opinion. If you can afford to build and ship the basic product with the premium feature lurking within, then you can afford to sell it for the basic price.    
This gets to people in a visceral way because you're locking them out of something they own. >

Not always true. Here’s an example. I work for a company building embedded semiconductors. We license the GPU. The cost to build is very cheap. The main cost is the royalty (cost for all the R&D, patents, IP) which is multiple times the actual cost to manufacture it. The company we got the GPU from allows us to not pay the royalty until the customer enables the feature via secure e-fuse. We do the same for additional CPU cores, AI/ML accelerators, etc. So if you buy it, you paid for the HW but you haven’t paid for the R&D/IP/patents/SW.