These "hardware features", whether its [U]EFI or ME or whatever acronym, IMO is a land grab by hardware vendors over what we know as the "OS". Less computer owner control, more vendor control.
As long as you can still run the OS of your choice at the top of this stack of vendor OSs, what do the vendors gain by this 'land grab'? Particularly the HW vendors. I can imagine Apple and MS are happy to lock things down so only their OSs run easily but What benefit does any HW vendor get from from UEFI? Surely the benefit to Intel from IME is being able to say "you can remotely manage and recover a borked server if you have our IME enabled", but I can't think what else it gives them.
I like the idea of a system running hardware that does the minimum of initialisation before running code of the user's choice but that is more due to my being an 8-bit kid and worries of buggy vendor blobs than assuming the HW vendors are being nefarious.