Potential good side of freemium hardware: Acquiring low-end hardware and somehow hacking it into a higher-end version. Manufacturers will try to make cheaper hardware by cramming more functionality onto one SoC, thus slowly driving down costs for technology in general.

Potential bad side of freemium hardware: More locked down systems, more undocumented hardware, possible backdoors and more spying (how else are we going to recover the cost of the hardware?) Devices could emerge that are "dumber," i.e. they are merely proprietary touchscreen frontends for services offered in "the cloud." People might like getting "a free tablet" even if it just does one thing.