I think the evidence is pretty convincing that they were counterfeits created by people with no connection to Intel.

Putting the CPU/heatsink aside - If you wanted to ship a demo unit, wouldn't you just use the exact same box that you're already producing thousands of in the factory and slap a "demo" sticker on it? Even if you made a separate demo box, there's no reason that the boilerplate text wouldn't just be a copy/paste. It's obvious that someone not familiar with English and French manually copied the text (the French text is even worse than the English; the accents are missing pointing in the wrong direction).