It was justification for an OS that has the capability to phone home over a network, and now twenty years later we have Windows OSes that log and report everything down to the minute details of what you do in the calculator. Xbox was the same thing: justification for developing code-signature enforcement, hardware attestation, remote key revocation, etc. We would have opposed those things if they came from the world of general-purpose computing, so instead they were developed on an appliance platform where media """needs""" to be protected from the user, then it metastasized over to our computers two generations later once it was battle-tested.
Code-signature enforcement, hardware attestation, and remote key revocation aren’t inherently bad things. Like almost all technologies there are cases where they can be abused, but they can also be used to massively increase security on sensitive systems.
I develop industrial IoT gateways that are deployed to client sites, often in places which aren’t massively well secured from a physical perspective. Often an attacker could get in with a hi-vis vest and a clipboard.
Hardware attestation allows us to store encryption keys for the internal storage in a way that makes that storage useless if you remove it from the device. Signature enforcement prevents an attacker from booting their own OS on the devices and extracting keys that way (this also works alongside hardware attestation, as the TPM isn’t going to return a valid decryption key unless the expected kernel has booted). Remote key revocation allows us to terminate the device’s connection to our backend if it’s stolen.
If general purpose computers were routinely shipping with all those features turned on to ensure you could only boot a properly licensed version of Windows, and you had no access to enrol new keys, then I’d be with you, but that’s not the reality of things. If I buy a computer, either an Intel PC or an Apple desktop/laptop, I can install an OS of my choosing on it. We haven’t really lost anything here beyond the ability for people to trivially compromise computers without being detected.
