PS3 was released in 2006, and finally broken in 2010 due key management issues (not a flaw in the firmware afaik). Do you really think that running Linux on Surface in 2016 will be relevant anymore? The device probably will be EOLed long before that.
Until 2010 you could run Linux on the PS3 without breaking any kind of security, using the built-in "OtherOS" feature. On April 1, 2010, that feature was removed with a firmware update. I think it actually took until 2011 for a working jailbreak to be released.
Your overall point is correct, even if the PlayStation is not a good supporting argument.
Access to the hardware via OtherOS was afaik severely limited, and more comparable to having Linux on a virtual machine than running it on the actual hardware. iirc eg the GPU was not accessible in OtherOS which limited the usefulness quite much.
The presence of OtherOS, crippled as it was, prevented enough people from being interested in putting in the effort to get more out. The general consensus at the time seemed to be that this was exactly the sort of effect Sony was going for when they included OtherOS in the first place.
At one point, after OtherOS was removed but before the keys were reverse engineered, there was some sort of "jailbreak" that used a bug in the PS3's USB stack.
Before the keys were reverse engineered the exploits were limited to running userland code only afaik, ie you couldn't replace the firmware/os with those.
