Intel got a pretty good thrashing over the incident, and a lot of people have mistakenly taken the stance that this is a new idea for them too. Intel is not the first company to implement serial numbers on processors. It's actually quite common on business class workstations. But they have the largest share of chips on home computers - and they were the first to attempt to implement the idea in that market. They learned that some common business tactics don't apply to the home marketplace.
People are ever more concerned about privacy.
And this is as it should be. There are no laws to stop these digital invasions of privacy. But it's hard not to see that both had extremely bad moral implications. People may not understand that proprietary software has locked them into a monopolistic market, a never ending cycle. But they can look immediately at these examples and see that some of the benefits give too much power to large corporations.