It makes perfect sense in the enterprise space to facilitate the illusion of management control (there is a good reason the IT dept trope is so widespread). LOM has been a thing on servers since forever. And absent some enormous financial incentive, it's absurd to think that Intel would go through this much trouble to architect something like this with a primary goal of providing American three letter agencies a backdoor. On the other hand, the magic killswitch you guys put in equally obviously was requested by them, this thing basically makes anything with an Intel desktop CPU unusuable in a high-security context.

But given the already well-known threat model at the time this thing was conceived of self-propagating malware, creating a technology that is embedded in every single device with a desktop CPU that can't be turned off, makes the device unusable without it, and has remote compromise bugs that can succeed while the target is "off" was certainly a bad idea.