Or you outright ignore the stipulation and do whatever the hell you want. Quite frankly I hope to see some benchmark articles that literally start with profanity telling Intel where to stick it.

This, definitely. This whole thing is bullshit. What are they going to do, sue the hell out of absolutely everyone who publishes any sort of benchmark about their hardware ? What do they want for themselves, become a lawyer's cabinet like Oracle ?

The CPU isn't patched, not permanently. This update must be loaded after every processor reset.