We ran in to the exact same issue.

As you say this is a pretty basic feature and one that not having is very not cool.

So why do they do it? You could say that it is simply greed but actually the answwer is a bit more complex. The hardware manufacturers don’t want to make a lot of different products so they try to make a product that fits with in a range. Take your 6140 for Sun it costs them the same to manufacturer no matter how many servers are attached to it so how should they price it? If they price it based simply on a fixed profit percentage and charge the same for everyone then users that only want to attach 1 or 2 hosts to the system are effectively paying a lot more for their storage than someone that wants to attach 16 hosts to it (on average). This pricing makes it less attractive for customers with fewer servers.

To get around this the manufacturers are basically providing a discount for customers to purchase at the entry level with only a few hosts and as their need goes up they recover some of this initial discount in the form of license fees.

This may seem like they are taking advantage of you but in reality they are trying to make their product attractive and price competitive to a wider range of customers.

The real problem isn’t that the Sun/IBM/HP/EMC/Dell etc do this the problem is that they don’t explain it well or sometimes at all.