Practical security for 2014

I suspect one of the drivers for SecureBoot is to prevent the "hypervisor in the middle" attack on Windows hardware fingerprinting for licensing. I have seen this in action on a friend's PC, obtained from a dodgy supplier: the boot sequence went via GRUB which loaded a hypervisor which then appeared to spoof the hardware details to fool the licence activation mechanisms of Windows. When I fixed the boot loader (suspecting that it was a virus) Windows started to complain that the hardware had changed and it needed its licence reactivating.