You're all about the blank hardware's cost this, cheaper materials, open source hardware. Your discussion about programmed ATE calibration discussion and "clever program" driven devices suggest you're advocating mass production friendly platform to host a closed source encrypted firmware that uses indefinite copyright, intellectual property and NDAs instead to oppress innovation unlike patents that will become available for everyone to use.
Let me guess, you see hardware like a blank disc which should as cheap as possible and easily China made while using firmware/software/embedded codes as the main product so it can be produced at low cost, then sold at extremely high cost.
Microcontroller based embedded systems with proprietary has been the sinful tactic brand owners have been using to reduce manufacturing cost, lock down high level calibration settings to their authorized service techs and inhibit competition by copyrighting codes. Very common in industrial and laboratory instrumentation. The backbone is fairly common stuff, but they make it proprietary embedded craptems using codes.
One of the reasons with embedded systems is the malice can be built-in, such as worms, malware in order to make it malfunction to botch the process. Build malware into an ECU, so that if someone chose to install a pirated "tune" or the firmware, it will go out of control and crash.
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I think that making it look deceptively simple to copy but with a hidden trap that takes a long time to show up (like the MAC address reverting I mentioned earlier) would keep the pirates from putting much effort into making the copy, thus increasing the chance they'll ship flawed copies.
Probably doesn't apply in your case, but if it has Ethernet or other network interface (and is likely for multiple units to be used on one network), have the copy protection revert the MAC address to some default value a few months after it detects a pirate copy. The pirate would probably copy the code as-is (except for the MAC address), sees that it works, and ship it. A few months later, some very strange problems occur as the devices all revert to the default MAC address.
One way to do that is to cryptographically sign the MAC address and hide the signature away from the MAC address. Put the MAC address in an obvious place so that the pirate would go for it and trigger the hidden copy protection mechanism.
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