[appleflaxen]

This is the key quote:

  The feature table also lists various supported 
  applications, demonstrating the interest of the 
  manufacturer in programming the device for specific 
  applications, rather than providing a platform for others 
  to do so. (Imagine if manufacturers of USB drives made USB 
  drives for text files and USB drives for image files and 
  USB drives for MP3 files and so on, and the idea of selling 
  a USB block device was alien to these people. If you wanted
  to store a new kind of file on a USB drive, you had to 
  convince the manufacturer to implement support for it.) The 
  draw of the Nitrokey then is the possibility the 
  manufacturer merely incidentally allows alternate firmware 
  to be flashed, rather than the manufacturer explicitly 
  capitalising on the premise of an HSM as a general-purpose 
  platform.

Great point, and completely lost on manufacturers.