It's perfectly legit, you have to factory reset from recovery mode or something, then you can run games with a keycombo (I'm leaving out details, but I assure you it IS possible) however, the home menu, and by extension, it's applets (browser, etc.) aren't running, which limits the permissions we have. Simply put, it IS possible to recover from this state, but it's not as easy, as we have less to work with here... Depending on the system version, though, it might not be too hard (the RSAVerify vuln, for example, is rather simple, can be done from any system 4.x or less and doesn't need a lot of code or permissions to exploit)
All that said, ninjhax 1.x needs browser running, *hax 2.x needs home menu running (which is the replacement for the browser requirement, essentially)