To update my earlier reporting, here's the current state, again as reported on the pca news page.

The new Sun access restrictions only apply to Solaris 10 (and anything Sun releases later). For Solaris 9 and earlier, Sun isn't making any changes for patch access; anonymous access via pca continues to work. (I was wondering about that, since I have been too busy to get around to getting a Sun Online Account, yet my patch access was still fine.)

Since all of my machines are Solaris 9 (or earlier) and I have no plans of upgrading to Solaris 10, this is ideal for me.

(While Solaris 10 has a fair amount of nice goodies, I have never done a Solaris OS upgrade, I have no idea how hassle-free it is, and the machines are old enough that we need to think about their future in general.)