The PS3 was incredible value dollar-to-flop, given that it was sold at a loss. This resulted in universities and other research institutes buying them en masse to create supercomputer clusters. Naturally buying thousands of consoles but not a single game puts sony in a difficult position. Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.
The US Department of Defense went quite a bit further. They created the Condor Cluster in 2010 which was comprised of 1760 PS3s. At the time it was placed 33rd worldwide for a supercomputer.
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...
The marketing win of being able to say "these are so poweful, the military literally uses them in supercomputers" certainly more than makes up for a hundredth of a percent of consoles having a zero attach rate.
I would be curious to know more precise numbers. My intuition suggests that when Sony sells millions of them, the number diverted for non-gaming purposes is maybe thousands or tens of thousands.
Nearly 90 million units by the time it was discontinued, but I'm not sure how many were sold at the point they removed Linux support.