I think it bears mentioning that at one point in time the hardware was the software for the most part. Now the hardware has grown powerful and general-purpose enough that it can largely be abstracted out of the picture for most applications (or at least abstracted to down to general high-level parts -- e.g. X Mb/Gb of RAM vs what type of controller chip is being used).

I think that most people that are interested in 'tinkering' with things are doing it in software instead of hardware.