I don't fully agree :). Openflow would make use of the same hardware table, and for a full Openflow implementation would presumably have to rely on hardware bas

I don't fully agree :). Openflow would make use of the same hardware table, and for a full Openflow implementation would presumably have to rely on hardware based MAC learning to scale. The switch software would still use some API to program the chip. Sounds like in this case, there was an interaction between the hardware and chip API, which would have been exactly the same case with Openflow. I think this problem would have probably occurred even with a centralized controller