This was my first thought as well, although I never expected Intel willing to resort to such low tricks since it indicates they don't care at all about their customers. I would expect that move from a used car shady salesman, not from Intel: there are businesses out there that would be forced to ditch perfectly working hardware just because of this. I'll surely consider moving elsewhere in the future.

That's pretty shortsighted then. The only thing this will do is drive those sales to the competition. The people who are using this hardware are likely not doing so by choice so if you cut them off and force them to re-invest they will not be bitten the same way twice.

Wouldn't simply not providing old versions of the driver achieve the same thing then?

And beyond that, what's the logic? "We don't want black hats to diff our patches so we make sure that the legit users can't get patched firmwares in the first place"? Doesn't really add up to me. People with enough knowledge, time and resources to pull such an attack will manage to get the binaries one way or the other.

I still think that incompetence and laziness are more likely causes.

Removing old files to prevent bad guys from getting their hands on them is utterly pointless if you announce the removal beforehand.