Yeah this practice needs to end. You buy a stack of hardware+software that does X.

Imagine if pizza consisted of software and hardware and you only bought hardware but software could be changed by dev/seller. Now your pizza shrunk in size, changed taste, or could only be eaten by a fork that is supplied for free by the pizzashop, otherwise special chemical compounds would make it disintegrate if you'd try to eat it using your hands or anything else. Technically you still have that pizza you bought...