Feels like, to me, that nvidia is testing out this whole, "Let's Quadro cards out for mining as their own line" with driver lockouts with these lower end cards. Then they can release the next generation of cards with hardware-based lockouts and drivers that have been fully broken, relocked down, broken, and relocked again over several iterations.
That way, they can release a new product stack, perhaps the Super line?, and prevent this situation from ever happening again. I'm fine with that. Let GPU mining die already. It's been a pox upon the industry for way too long. Go build an ASIC and leave gamers in peace. And if you think it's illegal to differentiate your product stack arbitrarily, well, Intel's been doing it for years. Nvidia had Quadro or Tesla. It's not illegal in any way and it's the way out of this GPU mining mess.
And I can't wait till they lock people out. I wish they could do it right this second (or even at the 3000 series launch), but unfortunately that genie's already out of the bottle. Hopefully, next product stack they can get it fixed.