It's not their first rodeo. Their cards already need to authenticate with the driver to be enable the card completely. When I last checked, Nouveau driver has received a key which only enabled the hardware, allowing enough features to see a desktop and install closed NVIDIA drivers, nothing more.

NVIDIA is holding to its pearls like a sloth holding to its branch, because their all business model and livelihood is dependent on that control. I still commend AMD's decision to allow full card enablement with any driver which talks the correct language.