Personally? I'd say that this is totally unreasonable. Pre-restricting the use cases of the device that YOU bought and have the ownership of is absolutely not OK.

There are a multitude other trivial ways this could be accomplished, but they chose the "lets squeeze the market" and "fuck the modders" option.

The company is a part of the society, and has the responsibility of providing support for their devices. Society provides the customers and money, and the company has the obligation of providing support.

They could just burn the serial to the silicon and when someone needs support, they need to provide the serial and they cross-reference the data tied to the serial number. Too much ram? "Yeah, sorry, we can't guarantee the operation of your device. Here's a 5% off coupon for our store to get one with our genuine hardware"

THIS WAS SUCH AN EASY MARKETING WIN :(