I've no idea why Tony had problems. But it's also entirely obvious that if he couldn't even get the laptop to attempt to boot from USB, he was never getting far enough for Secure Boot to be involved in any way at all.

The "Use Windows to choose your boot device" process is significantly more consistent than the old "Go into your firmware and find the option that tells it to attempt to boot from USB" process. From that perspective, yes, I think it's an improvement.