I just spent a while reading that article you linked to... it occured to me that there will be several problems with shoving Palladium/TCPA down consumers' and business users' throats.
First, there is alreay a very wide base of non-TCPA compliant computers out there, a lot of which have been recently updated, which people will be reluctant to part with. Since computer hardware and software, if properly maintained, has a VERY long lifetime (my old Zenith Data Systems 8088 still works, with Wordstar 5...), there are going to be a lot of computers out there which are not under the control of this little cesspool of evil.
Second, most attempts at digital rights management software have been implemented only by Microsoft, mainly because they, for all practical purposes, are THE operating system provider for most PC-platform devices. Users of Macs, Linux, UNIX, etc... have largely been ignored. Remember DeCSS? It was originally coded to allow for playback of DVD video discs (playback, NOT illegal sharing/copying, as the MPAA will try to convince you) on Linux, as the licensing for the CSS decryption would have either been too expensive for any open-source developer to acquire, or would simply not have been allowed for use in open-source software. If users are faced with the choice of either getting an operating system that will phone home every time they run software, limit their choices in electronic media, etc... I'm fairly sure there will be a lot more Linux users in the near future. If computers begin to require a TCPA-signed operating system... a lot of people will be looking for older computers that don't. (Hang onto your hardware, folks.)
As for the legal requirement of TCPA... computers without it would not be illegal to possess, however, they may become illegal to transport across state lines for commercial purposes (in other words, you can't buy from out of state). This is really the government's ONLY means of enforcement..
Finally, there is the question of how the hell this is going to work. Microsoft may go on and on about its digital rights management technologies, but, the truth is, they are NOT secure. Every one of their attempts at securing digital audio have been cracked at one point or another. Additionally, legislators are not programmers, and they do not understand how difficult a true secure system would be to implement. The only real way that digital media could be made truly copy-protected is to render it unplayable in any form (something, again, which many Windows media implementations have accomplished quite by accident!)
Meanwhile, quite a few new DVD releases have come out without any copy protection whatsoever... the reason mainly being that, unlike digital audio, video simply takes up too much bandwidth to be sent over the Internet without either taking too long to send, taking up too much storage space, or suffering a significant loss in quality... coupled with the fact that most people don't want to watch movies on their PC's monitor. The question might easily be, "why bother?"
... and there's my pi cents on the matter.
