And “just being the ganked version” in this case would mean not having a single feature that the vast majority of players likely wouldn’t even have used in the first place. Yes, it’s not good, but the choice here is between either locking your players out of that one non-essential feature or locking them out of the entire game. And the second option is, to me, very obviously much worse.
And it’s also not like it would be the “bad” version forever. They can just patch it in when they get it to work. And let players decide for themselves whether they want to get the game now without split screen or wait.