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.