To me, this is no different than some of the problems that DVD encountered when it finally went mainstream. The APEX DVD player that someone else mentioned is one player that had trouble with seamless branching and would choke on the T2 DVDs that came out. A firmware upgrade fixed it, but it had to be sent in to the manufacturer and then they removed the back door that let you change the region.
I doubt that the people who bought Blu-ray players are suddenly going to migrate to HD-DVD. Why would they do that? They've started a library of Blu-ray movies and those would be useless on an HD-DVD player. It's more likely that they'll wait for the 2.0 spec to be finalized and then get a player that can be upgraded in the future. And if they don't want to wait, they can just get a PS3. It really isn't our problem that the price of the PS3 doesn't cover the manufacturing cost. That's Sony's problem and it likely won't be a problem once Blu-ray really takes off since they'll be taking in even more fees from licensing at that point.
To be perfectly honest, the early adopters did "know what they were getting into". They knew there was a chance that BD wouldn't take off. They knew they might end up with a dead format. At least this way, they can still play the movies, they just can't necessarily access all the features. That's really no different from early adopters of HDTVs that don't have HDMI ports or DVI ports without HDCP. Those people will never be able to watch a hi-def movie at 1080p until they upgrade their TVs.
Early adoption of any new technology always involves getting screwed by something.