You maybe right - but I don’t think Apple is going to let HW screw their loyal customer base by not providing an easy and expensive solution.
My point is that MS could do this as well with XP customers, but they are not doing it because they want to ‘motive’ their ‘customer/victim’ base to upgrade to Vista/Win 7 by coming up with some more money!
They are providing a solution, if you look in the article. It just will be slower. As will those for the other OS, I expect. They are simply taking advantage of it to try to get more people to upgrade.