Please, for the sake of clarity and to avoid any confusion going forward, explain to us the difference and meaning. There's gonna be a lot of double talk going forward from people who have a different agenda than getting the facts straight.
Also, because while I know what you mean, and have an idea of the two meanings, I'm honestly not sure which is which.
Access to full hardware = you have
access to the full hardware.
You could read things from a disk drive, you could render using the GPU, you could see things through the kinect, you could compute using cpu power and you could write to ram and access the hard drive or see if an internet connection is present via networking, as well as take inputs from a controller.
You just can't necessarily
do anything useful with that access.
Knowing there is an internet connection present is moot if you cannot use any networking protocols or intiiate any downloads of additional content (or whatever).
Maybe you are limited to only drawing raster or vector graphics in the GPU. Or maybe you can only use software rendering instead of HW T&L.
Maybe you can only use the D-Pad of a controller. Maybe you're only allowed to access one of the CPU cores and everything has to be coded as a virtualised or finite state machine. Maybe you're not allowed access to more than 512Mb RAM at any time, so have to aggressively garbage collect continously.
There's all sorts of restrictions possible while still having access to full hardware.
Full hardware access is access to all features of the hardware.
EDIT:
I make no claims to insider knowledge or any claims that any of the above is in fact the case.
I'm just suggesting it is extremely sensible to parse what statements are being released very carefully.
