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It's not necessarily as different as it seems. When you buy a second hand Tesla from Tesla it can happen that a feature that the previous owner had has been disabled. Tesla has in fact been accused of disabling features of cars that were not sold through them.

Does the 1000 USD upgrade buy the feature or merely enable it for the time that the owner owns the car?

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Charging a new owner to unlock the feature again is slightly different than charging the original owner a subscription.

However, I still see selling features as a software upgrade strictly as an alternative means* of selling upgrades. So the upgrade should be tied to the car, not the owner. The added bonus here would be that a second owner could unlock features that the initial owner didn't want.

*i.e. Tesla might decide it's better just to put the heated seats in all cars rather than manufacturing cars with and without.

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