What nigtmarish PR are you talking about? Nobody cares, just like nobody cared when they started shipping cpus with embedded Intel ME.
Seeing as AMD are getting back into the game with their new Zen architecture, I think this is a very unwise move by Intel.
They advertised it as non-overclockable, but some users found out it was -- why bother patching? To force those users to buy the more expensive 'unlocked' chips for something that used to be free.
Do you mean like embedded backdoors?