UEFI was never designed to be our friend. At the core of it lies the secureboot process, a buzzword that sounds like a good idea, because if weren't a buzzword it would be: startup the system with a known set of drivers, digitally signed so that tampering with them will prevent a system from coming up. This is in and of itself not necessarily a bad thing. However, there is also a downside to this: control of the secureboot architecture and platform lies with a single company. A company that has stated that it reserves the right to revoke any signing key that it feels threatens the security of the platform. In other words: in order for a system to be considered secure and trusted, we as consumers have to trust in the benevolence of a single company. That is a vendor lock-in waiting to happen.
What Mr. Poettering is now proposing to do is that we fall for this scheme and dig ourselves deeper into vendor lock-in land. This guy seems hell-bent on dismantling the last remaining bit of freedom of choice we have where Linux is concerned. Systemd, in and of itself already a violation of very core of the UNIX philosophy and still every major distribution jumped straight onto the bandwagon and made every single aspect of their Linux flavour dependant on it. Now, we're stuck with systems full of potential security holes, because everything is handled by a single monolithic process, instead of following the inherently better philosophy of writing small scripts or programs that do a single thing and do it well.
It used to be that Linux was all about choice. Don't like the BSD rc style bootup process? Use sysvinit. Or vice versa. Don't like either of them? Use another init flavour (or systemd if that's to your liking). But now entire portions of the userland -depend- on systemd to work. And why? Because some idiot with the barest of programming skills (remember the litter of bugs in the early versions of systemd) decided it could and should be done differently and the great masses of the people blindly followed suit.