They wanted the mouse to have a name like “Microsoft® Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000” but they accidentally used the wrong encoding and the name was invalid. Because they already made thousands of devices without properly testing them, the “obvious” solution was to patch the Bluetooth stack on every single computer in the world to fix this issue. It’s the only Bluetooth device released in computer history that requires this.
Lots of drivers are doing things like this I bet. It’s much easier to fix software than hardware.
Unlikely to be the case for mice, though, since lots of mice use the same drivers. As far as I’m aware, there’s just a handful of popular chipsets, which implement the logic, so you just need a handful of drivers.
This is particularly apparent on Linux, where most drivers are built into the kernel. You can take virtually any mouse and use it on Linux without installing drivers (although you might still want a separate program to setup LEDs or DPI profiles or whatever).
And yeah, you don’t want to have to get a patch into the Linux kernel to fix random spelling mistakes or similar…
I remember when one of the Guitar Hero games was first released for Xbox, they soon had a big problem where lots of guitar peripherals were behaving strangely. I think in the end the whammy bar wasn’t always going to what the sensor read as 100 or 0 or something like that because of weak springs or poor physical fit with the plastic, and in the end the fix was basically to adjust how the values were read in software.