Thanks for confirming my suspicion; the fact that "it's a feature not a bug" is pretty unethical has nothing to do with whether it can successful or not. It's a useful logical tool to learn to distinguish "is" from "ought"; whether or not you think that Smart TVs are better than dumb TVs or not has no bearing on whether or not they're marketed as such and most importantly believed as such by the majority of consumers.

Hell it's not even one of the worst heuristics in play: (higher) price and popularity of a product as a heuristic for quality may be even worse than "more features" as a heuristic, and these two are extremely prevalent. And yet just because I don't like them doesn't mean I pretend that these tendencies simply don't exist.