Is it a measure to combat counterfeit watches or to separate OEM crystals from third party ones?
It's usually not very hard to source OEM crystals, so to me it seems more likely that this would be about third party crystals and not counterfeit watches.
Can you think of any other supposed anti-counterfeiting measures besides the laser etched crystals? If this is something that the watch companies actually pursued it would be weird if they stopped at just that.