I mean, you've been able to brick hardware on Linux before in earlier versions of the kernel, where the firmware would get mounted, causing the user to blow away parts of their firmware when they wiped their drive (figuring it was just a recovery partition).
They've always had firmware updates for PCs and I'd rather have an industry wide open source solution that individual OEMs. Just recently Lenovo messed up flashing a TB chip firmware and bricked several high end notebooks.
Apple did firmware updates as part of their OS updates [edit: on Mac], and they did fairly well although I seem to remember one update that did something nasty to one set of machines.
