Considering the incredibly small amount of data that’s been published about the PS3’s nand I can’t say I’m surprised. The golden rule is never install a Waninkoko firmware mod until a month after it’s first released. Large numbers of Wiis were bricked in the early days as well but after a couple months of “alpha” quality work Waninkoko became the gold standard for playing backup games and downgrading firmware.
I can’t imagine why Sony would have different sized nand’s but that’s definately a common cause for bricks because the block addresses needed for critical things like the bootcode would be different.
Still, Waninkoko’s backup player has never gotten anyone banned from Nintendo’s online network (and yes they do ban) so this pretty much means Sony is boned. I forsee people swapping the tiny stock drives for 2TB hard drives.