This "ugly hack" is a hole you can drive a truck through, and one can be pretty sure the patent lawyers will find an aircraft carrier, load it up with trucks, and drive through it collectively.
It's silly to assume no change in behavior, any legal counsel from that point on will advise in favor of patenting the hardware implementation, and instead of patented software running on commodity hardware we'll end up with patented "appliances" and "reference hardware implementations" with broad claims extending to other types of hardware implementations.
It's silly to assume no change in behavior, any legal counsel from that point on will advise in favor of patenting the hardware implementation, and instead of patented software running on commodity hardware we'll end up with patented "appliances" and "reference hardware implementations" with broad claims extending to other types of hardware implementations.