FWIW...
I agree with Ampfixer about "disposable" gear. I have guitars that are 50 years old and not only do they work fine, you can still buy replacement strings for them.
I also have digital keyboards from the 80s that work, but once some critical component fails and is no longer available, then that instrument becomes useless.
The V-Studio controller is Mackie-compatible and I use it with other programs, like Reason and Vegas. It also still works fine with SONAR. But again, it's likely that at some point a proprietary component will fail and that will be the end of it. I believe there are also some quirks with the Mackie Control implementation with SONAR because I tested it with the SSL Nucleus. Great controller, and worked fine for the basics...but as soon as you tried to control buses, you couldn't get back to any other mode of operation.
The issue of support for companies is tricky. Most companies do not make their own components and rely on third-party supply chains. Due to the size of our industry, these are often single-sourced. So let's suppose your V-Studio controller goes south. Roland may not be able to fix it because the company they used to make certain components is either out of business or moved on and no longer makes that part. Most companies will keep spare parts on hand to handle future service needs, but eventually those will run out. Of course drivers can be re-written, but as has been pointed out here, to be fair to Roland the economics of doing so don't make sense.
Finally, there's the desire of companies to sell you new stuff, whether you need it or not. I had a Matrox graphics card which was supposedly not compatible with 64-bit Windows 7. I contacted the company about a driver and they said no way, didn't exist, had to buy a new card. But then I found an installation package for servers that included a 64-bit Windows 7 compatible driver for the card. It worked perfectly, and was even identified as being for 64-bit Windows 7.
Or the Epson scanner that supposedly had no driver that would work with 64-bit systems. Yet I found a driver on the web someone had hacked (illegally, of course...you're not supposed to reverse engineer or modify a manufacturer's code) and it worked fine. Apparently all it required was removing or adding a line of code, it was a very simple change.
Or take my Apple quad core Xeon, which was manufactured two weeks before the cutoff date for being able to run full 64-bit operating systems. That cutoff date had nothing to do with technology; it's possible to modify the computer to work as a full 64-bit machine and run operating systems past Lion. But Apple would much rather that I buy a new computer.
It's a helluva stupid world we're leaving for our kids.