If this surprises you, I've got some bad news for you. Everyone does binning. Go buy 1000 5% resistors and test them. Instead of a normal distribution of tolerances, you'll find that there's an interesting trough around -2% to +2%. That's because all of the resistors are made using the same process and the lower tolerance ones are binned and sold at a higher price.

Same goes for silicon. The dies are largely the same. Only later in the process, they get binned to a lower spec cpu by selectively disabling features. Generally, this is because the chip doesn't meet some spec, but there are cases where this is simple done to meet demand.

Out of all the things they have done this is the straw that broke the camel's back for you? If it has the advertised number of lanes, performance, etc., then it wouldn't affect me if I bought it, no? And if it did not have the advertised feature then it would be fraud and I would have a recourse? It's the same socket after all and I will never see how many nanometers the chips are. The i3's are locked down hard anyways.