[remram]

How come there is so much "permanent" config for SD cards?

[hypercube33]

I believe it's because it originally was SD/MMC which was supposed to be a future media for audio and the like for retail sale. I had some read only palm pilot cards like this - books etc were also sold this way for a short period.

[userbinator]

The spec was developed with DRM as one of its use cases.

[msarnoff]

Probably the same reason microcontrollers have OTP fuses—to prevent accidental corruption in the field or from buggy programming.