None of the consequences of the law were unintended. The lawmakers never gave any thought to the idea of hackers being something other than criminals. The idea of PCs being the dominant mode of computing remains foreign to most of our lawmakers, who think that their laptops, desktops, and tablets are just terminals used to connect to industrial systems. Killing the hacker spirit is not unintended; the law envisioned a world without hackers at all.
It is still assumed by those in power that programming is something you do for pay (and for the maximum pay you can find), that source code is a valuable industrial secret, and that the Internet is divided into "clients" and "servers" (i.e. it is just a shadow of the world, which is "producers" and "consumers"). Sure, there are "hobbyists" out there who play with computers, but the serious work and the dissemination of technology is done by industry. It is the same worldview that says that research can only be done by those with an affiliation and that legal documents can only be read by lawyers (hence the prosecution of Aaron Swartz).
Do you really think that every legislator has no problem with any eventual use of this law?
I think that's an important distinction to make (it's not every legislator that's a corporate shill or working to repress an aspect of free choice based on their own perceived moral superiority).