I got mine in Hong Kong but after a butt-load of checking to see if they had the friggin' TA-082. Some boxes had the letter K in the box (meaning they were firmware 2.7 or above) and since at the time, there was only a downgrader for up to 2.6 I only checked PSPs with the letter I on the box. I checked around 10 PSPs in 10 different stores. Well, they ALL had the damn TA-082 board.
It was when all the stores were about to close that I gave up on getting one, but my sister wanted one as well and didn't care about homebrew or loading ISOs. The clerk offered to upgrade the firmware to 2.71, which was the latest at the time, I said "no thanks, I'd rather have 1.5 instead". Then he replied "Oh, we have some of those too. They are brand new. We just opened the box to do the downgrade ourselves".
Apparently other stores did that as well. You just had to ask. (I got mine in Nathan road, Hong Kong, near the electronic district).
PSP Value Pack with 1.5 for 1800 Hong Kong dollars (roughly 180 Euros).
EDIT: Forgot to add. Those 1800 HK$ were for an already downgraded PSP. The regular value pack, black or white was 1600HK$. Basically they charged you 200HK$ (around 20 Euros) for the downgrade. Considering how hard it was for me to find a non-IC1003 (TA-082) board, and that I've heard something might go wrong during the downgrading process, I was not willing to pay 160 Euros for something I could brick 2 days later.