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Trezor User Manual says
if you forget the passphrase there will be no way to recover your bitcoins. Not even the Recovery seed.
How is it that you (or an attacker who knows the seed) can't just restore a soft wallet with some other application and recover the bitcoins with the other application?
The sentence you cited is from the Using passphrase encrypted seeds section. As the title suggests, the actual seed is not stored in your Trezor if you're using passphrase protection. Instead, a passphrase-encrypted version of the seed is stored in the device (and also exported as a Recovery seed, if needed).
Obviously, if an attacker were to obtain the unencrypted (plain) seed, he would be able to restore your wallet and steal the coins easily. It is however not feasible to extract the plain seed from the encrypted one, if a sufficiently complex passphrase is used.
The seed is protected with a password or PIN; it precludes the possibility of stolen devices being decrypted whilst online malware/rootkits are precluded by the hardware device being separate from the compromised OS's memory pool.
From Trezor:
TREZOR’s PIN based security system is a powerful tool to keep your bitcoin’s safe. If your TREZOR is stolen, the only thing between the thief and your bitcoins is your PIN and/or passphrase. It is imperative that you choose a good PIN!
