I am of two minds of such a split world, as all too often it means that when a geek is called on to fix something for the rest of us, they invariably can't because they can't get the right access.

Never mind that i fear that the black hats of the world will always find a way to break the sandbox of the "safe" computers, and thus we are effectively fucked. Because now they have access on a level the rest of us do not, and thus can't counter their actions.

BTW, i do believe Cory Doctorow has done a couple of speaking tours on this under the titles "The coming war on general purpose computing" and "The coming civil war on general purpose computing".

The first being about government demands for a computer that do everything but some naughty action, and the second about well meaning geeks locking down computers to make them "safer".