It's certainly not the same. In one case, the client had already paid for the feature but weren't aware, and a salesperson told them they needed to upgrade to u

It's certainly not the same. In one case, the client had already paid for the feature but weren't aware, and a salesperson told them they needed to upgrade to unlock it (a lie). In the latter case, they simply didn't pay for the feature. Is it ethically wrong to ship chicken bits like that? You can make arguments either way (e.g. a device might not have been QA'd or tested for the disabled features, and the feature itself might be faulty, e.g. that's extra support labor they didn't pay for). But that's a different question to whether the salesperson should have sold them a feature they already had access to.