Good point. I imagine that other labs also restrict access to frontier models, but less publicly so. Do we know that, say, Gemini lets you develop a competitor product without any safeguards?

In general this appears to be par-for-the-course with tech. Many Google products are notoriously slower or even unusable in Safari and Firefox, but we can't know for sure whether that's due to Chrome optimizations or purposefully wasted code cycles in other browsers.