I can't speak to the printer case but silicon manufacturers do this to an absurd degree with their SKUs. See the GTX 690 to Quadro conversion hack [1].

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-GTX-690-Quadro-K5000...

There are a few cases of this, but mostly this is done as a way to deal with variations in manufacturing as explained above. Furthermore, from that article:

> We do know if the system sees the card as a Quadro K5000 card, but we cannot be sure about whether it actually performs like one or if it is entirely bug-free.

You change the Device ID and the OS thinks it's something else, sure, but you could do that with anything with comparable specification.

Honestly, I'm remembering a Joel On Software article that doesn't precisely quote its source.

Your question needs a solid answer if someone tries to use it to argue for net neutrality.