If it works as well for Big Brother as it does for me, we are safe. (I tried a round of vPro motherboards on my last server buy and got unusable remote screen access functionality with the added treat of an ethernet controller that locks up sporadically under linux.)
Article is from 2008 but to reiterate jws' comment, exactly right. I'm sure some big budget CIO or VP of IT said "We want to be able to do all this management without sending someone out there." and Intel put their software engineers on it and said "Voila!"
Remote administration at a hardware level isn't new. Not hardly. This is trash journalism at its worst. Pulling together a list of technologies and outlining a shallow examination of how they could be abused isn't much use to anyone. If we wanted to play that game, we could fill encyclopedias with lists of ways computers could be used to spy on us.
Technology reporting, Glenn Beck-style. "I'm not saying your mother's a whore, but..."