I'm not sure I buy that. If they had real access to the internals, they'd be fixing the BIOS bugs instead of hacking around it in the driver suite.
I think the real problem runs deeper: the culture of "firmware" in the PC world is fundamentally broken. PC BIOS exists more to protect the business models of the important players than it does to abstract the hardware in a meaningful way. And frankly it's hurting those players (like the big one that starts with an "I") badly in the embedded space, where 12-second POST times, duplicated drivers, and thousands of lines of workaround code aren't considered acceptable.
I think the real problem runs deeper: the culture of "firmware" in the PC world is fundamentally broken. PC BIOS exists more to protect the business models of the important players than it does to abstract the hardware in a meaningful way. And frankly it's hurting those players (like the big one that starts with an "I") badly in the embedded space, where 12-second POST times, duplicated drivers, and thousands of lines of workaround code aren't considered acceptable.