This is pretty big news by itself, but the lurking last paragraph is of equal note:

The Tiano/EFI technology has been endorsed by Microsoft, which will support it in its Longhorn operating system.

Of course, it might not have been endorsed were the license Intel was using was the General Public License, but long time partners Intel and Microsoft may have already hashed that out.

The very interesting part of this seems to be that Intel is going with Tiano/EFI now where IBM went with the PC/XT/AT in the 1980s; this could be really good for Intel. And it looks like it could be even better for the consumer.