In what world do you control the BIOS firmware but have no ability to fix the OS? Good hardware vendors have Red Hat and SuSE on the phone and can tell them that there's a bug that needs fixing.

Also, go read the two observed instances Matthew pointed out; in both cases, the firmware randomly breaks things rather than fixing them.

It'd be lovely to see the changelogs where someone added those particular bits of insanity and what they thought they were doing.