Although I agree it's a cool way of rolling out features it's more like buying a phone with 4G capabilities but it not being rolled out until a software update; It's always been possible in the cars they just got the federal approvement now.
In one sense, yes—though I would also compare it to some of the cool hacks NASA does getting orbiting telescopes and Mars rovers doing new things they weren't doing before. All the sensors and motors and antennae are there, but a firmware update can put them together in new ways to enable entirely new high-level behaviors that weren't being considered or planned for at launch.
An example in this vein: imagine a firmware update to a wi-fi router to give it MIMO support. A MIMO antenna isn't any different than a regular antenna; the difference comes in the baseband firmware doing clever-er math to pull out overlapped signals, spacially model their sources, and modulate its own output so the signal will constructively interfere for best performance at the destination.
