The thing is that their firmware is ultra-lightweight. One of the things they're proud of is that the firmware is extremely thin and basically shunts control signals directly from the cloud service. The cloud service does everything.

The expensive paperweight issue still stands.

I am not sure that this would be the case. If all the firmware has to do is process G code, that's oh well understood problem, and runs on Arduino's, and whatever is grilling this printer has to be at least as powerful as we oh well understood problem, and runs on Arduino's, and whatever is grilling this printer has to be at least as powerful as Arduino, and he clearly has four more storage since it can buffer print streams coming across the Internet which is a lot harder then coming in local connection. The only limitation I see is that the device does not have a USB port, which means that even if you're printing off-line you're going through Wi-Fi. If the company went under, I'm wondering if the answer wouldn't be to reverse engineer enough of the server-side to print, and run a copy of that locally, without having to change the printer's firmware.