So why put the scaler in there at all? And why enable half of it later? And why target 1080p owners who are in the minority? And crap out your HD movie playback which was a key aspect of your console? And why target 60" screen owners, when most of the world doesn't get such large TVs (AFAIK anyhow. Anyone got a breakdown? In Europe 40" is a big set).
I can't imagine Sony would look at their hardware and knowing it's abilities and limits, decide to try and force developers into targetting 1080p, especially without locking them into 1080p. If you
really wanted to do that, you'd only have 1080p as a render resolution and then scale the image to fit smaller res's. That'd mean every 1080p set owner would get native res, and everyone else would get decent quality. Hmmm, perhaps that's the answer! Maybe that's what they intended but then decided 1080p was too much of a load, and decided to allow rendering to lower resolutions?
Still wouldn't explain the disabling of the scaler though.