[PvK]

"We're right back to the misguided alarmism." Eh, it seems to me that rather we have two perspectives, and you just keep mis-labeling mine. Your perspective seems to be that "whether the user can play Blu-ray and HD-DVD or not" is a central issue, while I don't want my OS and hardware designed to shut off or degrade if some security code isn't happy. I want the right to program native code (or run whatever third party native code program) that communicates directly with hardware that is designed to let me freely read and output digital signals (e.g. for audio/video). I don't want to be forced to run software/hardware designed to limit what I can do, report on what I'm doing, or shut down systems if my computer seems to be doing something someone else's program hasn't approved.

"How were any of the pre-Vista DRMs opt-out?" Yes, I mean by running other software, or telling Media Player not to connect to the Internet to verify licenses etc. Is not Vista different from pre-Vista in that now it complies with a secret and potentially changeable spec which has the potential to disallow your media hardware to function? Maybe you can run other software on Vista now, but what if the HDCP support decides to update to include checking for unauthorized player software and disables/impairs your media hardware?

"I'm certain MS understood this, but they couldn't afford the black mark of having their media center unable to support the latest media tech.." MS can afford to do whatever they want, and they could very well have taken a stand for users being able to own and operate computers without media-industry sabotage designed into the OS and hardware, and could have led others in the rejection of such crap. Instead they signed right up. Seems to me it goes pretty well with their corporate strategy of trying to own and control how things work and remove such control from users, to slowly adjust users to accepting that people are just users, not owners or actual programmers, and software is a service.