Unless this adds significant costs to the hardware, I would think lower cost manufacturers would embrace this, as it allows operators to say “let’s buy a few of those cheaper ones to see how they fare”, whereas nowadays, they would have to switch a significant part of their network over to hardware they may not fully trust.

Interoperability, in general, is good for smaller or cheaper players. As a corollary, this announcement made me think Nokia must be a small player in this market.