[terrym]

Since it involved a group of people doing it, you can't really know what the true motivation behind it was -- but I think removing the otherOS functionality simultaneously gave the movement behind this 2 things:

1) Motivation, attention, and energy (more people hearing about their efforts, offering their help, more passionately)

2) An area to focus their energy on (jailbreaking, or restoring access to homebrew/otheros as a goal)

Another thing to consider is that as far as I know, you should in theory be able to run the system at it's full capacity with the latest hack, whereas anything running on otheros was crippled by default.