Davis resisted the VP1 update for a long time, until enough owners called/emailed asking about one. There was a discussion on the Ambient forum about it.
I doubt that the firmware is interchangeable between the 2. More likely it's a typo in the load, or, perhaps, as you surmise, they cut and pasted the patch from one to the other and forgot to edit it. I believe if you do the console keystrokes to see the rev version it shows on the screen as a VP2 as well.
If I had a original VP, I think I'd complain to Davis about that. Sooner or later some program is going to malfunction because it thinks it's talking to a different station.