Quote: "Most system vendors I know wouldn't lock you into....well anything. "
No, but they will lock you out. A little digression, Acer make a model of laptop with an AMD C50 processor. This processor supports hardware virtualisation but there is a mechanism provided by AMD to disable it by writing 64 cookie to a register (MSRC001_0118[SvmLockKey]). AMD write in their documentation the register should be "programmed with value supplied by user. This value should be stored in NVRAM."
Acer choose to lock down the hardware virtualisation and if you ask them for the value of the cookie to unlock it, you will be told that hardware virtualisation has been disabled for marketing reasons.
Back to the topic. If the UEFI secure booting is adopted, you will no doubt be told that if you want to use a non Microsoft operating system then you will have to purchase a machine from the (limited) range of machines intended for "Technical users" that come without keys and that "our prices start from ...".
Re: Microsoft is a Monopoly if This happens
No, but they will lock you out. A little digression, Acer make a model of laptop with an AMD C50 processor. This processor supports hardware virtualisation but there is a mechanism provided by AMD to disable it by writing 64 cookie to a register (MSRC001_0118[SvmLockKey]). AMD write in their documentation the register should be "programmed with value supplied by user. This value should be stored in NVRAM."
Acer choose to lock down the hardware virtualisation and if you ask them for the value of the cookie to unlock it, you will be told that hardware virtualisation has been disabled for marketing reasons.
Back to the topic. If the UEFI secure booting is adopted, you will no doubt be told that if you want to use a non Microsoft operating system then you will have to purchase a machine from the (limited) range of machines intended for "Technical users" that come without keys and that "our prices start from ...".