Yes, they do! That's the whole point of the product. Why would you even trust the sysadmin in the first place? The fact of the matter is that a lot of data leaks have been caused by insiders - either willingly or via social engineering.
This technology provides a method of closing this loophole and aims to enable users (not private people) to have a secure domain that not even someone with physical access to the system and all administrative privileges has access to.
Whether it works as advertised is another story of course, but the gist of it is that no one is to be trusted; especially not the sysadmin.
> With the obvious note that lots of home users are their own sysadmins.
Again - this is not primarily targeted at home users. Plus the vast majority of home users don't even know what administrating a system even means. And TBH - why should they? "It just works!" has been a very successful mantra for this one company what sells iPods and such... This might be hard to grasp for some greybeards, but hardware security by design is worth more than security cameras, NDAs, background checks and good work ethics.
> But if I'm forced to give someone else special beyond-root access to my device for DRM purposes, that's not acceptable.
And that's fine and you are free to not use these products then because they're not made for you anyway. This is not consumer level hardware (at least not yet).