At this point in time, making such assumption - that Ledger won't force to update in a later time - is similar to walk in thin ice. As you could see @22bits, Ledger doesn't have any problem in breaking their own fundamentals and won't stop at nothing in trying to defend their stance even thought it goes against their stance. Don't assume that such company won't adopt a more strict posture in the future regarding forcing their updates on their users.
This is a one-way street, there is no going back, they have already lost the trust of many buyers and saying they will stop the Ledger Recovery service will not solve the problem or restore trust. Therefore, they will continue in this direction, and part of the developer team may launch a similar HW if they do not achieve success.Absolutely right. They chose not to fully scrub the Ledger Recovery service from their timeline, which, in my opinion, would have been the appropriate action to partially repair the damage it caused. Postponing it to a later date feels like a temporary fix to mitigate the negative publicity, rather than a sincere effort to rectify the situation.
My guess is that they will probably quietly resume the service when the next super-bull run comes along and there's a massive influx of people who want to buy Bitcoins, if only to offset the sales to make sure they don't nosedive while the original users are boycotting them.
As for how long the firmware's going to be supported, it's anyone's guess. They could easily push a mandatory firmware update on everyone and obviously they can simply install the new firmware onto future hardware wallets that are sold.
