..I hope you realize that if they didn't remove OtherOS, hotz and others would have continued their efforts toward exploiting it. We simply don't know what the OtherOS exploit could have resulted in, but Sony and even Hotz himself sure thought it was serious and would lead to CFW etc.
The other exploits are irrelevant -- they would have either been redundant (because OtherOS exploit would have sufficed) or they would have been inevitable (found when OtherOS exploit was exhausted). At most, you could make the argument that it sped up the development of the following exploits. Still, it's kind of silly to say Sony should have just left the OtherOS exploit wide open.
Thing is, the OtherOS-based hack was not viable and would never lead to the catastrophic discovery of the private encryption key. All Geohotz had done was modify relatively safe unsigned files and Sony could have dealt with it in a targeted way.
You overestimate the amount of people out there who are capable of coming up with these hacks. The guys behind the USB loader were mod-chip developers, aka. straight up pirates. These guys
don't have the skill to do advanced hacks like the PS3 and Wii private signing key recovery or the 360 JTAG (the last two involving very advanced equipment and exotic measures such as freezing chips and bathing them on acid).
Whether or not Sony removed OtherOS as a knee-jerk reaction or they had it planned all along is not important. The
timing of it was simply utter terrible and it attracted unwanted attention from people with actual talent to discover system flaws. It also gave these people a strong motivation and a reason to not update their PS3 firmwares any longer.
Had Sony kept OtherOS around for longer, they could have dealt with USB Loader and minor exploits one at a time and reduced the hacking time window.