Good SEO is targeted towards computers rather than humans. In the case of this newsletter-style post, potential customers would probably want to click the product name to get more details, rather than clicking a series of words which might lead to the product web site or might lead to a Wikipedia page or something else. Since it was the first instance of the product name, I would have expected it to be linked. Hence, the potential grey-hat. Not a big deal, I was just curious what people thought.