I'd like to get back to Gutmann seeing as I had some time to read this analysis over the weekend. Here's the link again:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut00...vista_cost.txt
There is some scary sh%@ in here. The stuff that gets me starts at the section titled "Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support"
The part that really got me was Driver Revocation. Supposedly if the system detects a weakness in a driver that might cause it to become hackable this not only disables that driver on that local system but can send a message to Microsoft who then does the same on all other computers. Couple this with the elimination of unified drivers and you have a particularly horrid problem.
If there is a particular device that is being used to pirate media, not just the device but all the chips inside could have their drivers revoked. This could cause drivers from other, benign peripherals to be shut off just because it uses one of the same chips.
Yikes. Head for the Hills.