Agreed, although they're adjusting, slowly. I came across this earlier this year but they didn't even have a proper developer program at that time. One can get pick up used EEG equipment pretty cheap on eBay, however, and there are some open development tools from the scientific community that run on Linux, as I recall.

I guess I should have read the fine print. I ordered the $300 device after they sent an email a couple months ago.

It supposedly has shipped and will arrive any moment - I didn't realize it would be cripple-ware

From the description, these are still the full headsets you get with the other editions, you just don't get the SDK. You might not have that much trouble hacking it. Once it's in your hands, you can start sniffing the USB traffic. They say it doesn't require a driver, so it's probably a USB HID device which is even better and easier to work with.

You might still get pretty far even without the SDK. Once it arrives, you could post here on Hackernews for some help. I have a bit of experience reverse-engineering USB devices, but I'm sure there are others here that could help even more.

$300 is accessible to "hobbyist" researchers (hackers) - this is the main point of this story - and hackers will crack DRM.

And you need to pay them anywhere from 750 to 7500$ bucks to develop an application for it...

Developer headset is 500 bucks, Research edition (developer headset with EEG access) is 750, or 650 if you bought a developer headset a while ago.