Hacking several million computers is minor? What qualifies as major, then?

The Morris worm infected 2-3 orders of magnitude fewer computers...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

Well, there are surely more than three orders of magnitude more computers connected to the internet today than the 60,000 Paul Graham reports people guessing at in 1988.

Put another way, as dreadful as it is, Superfish was never at risk of partitioning the internet. The harm is restricted to those luckless individuals who purchased a Lenovo laptop in the particular time frame at issue; quite possibly a crime, but not, playing devil's advocate for reluctant prosecutors, a 'something must be seen to be done or I'll be lynched' level crime.

Consider what the outcome here would be if, instead of Lenovo expressly doing this, it was a single rogue employee who e.g. Modified the system image used by the factory with the exact same software in the exact same way and took the ad profits.

Whatever would happen in that situation should happen here. I would guess prison time would be involved.

You do not abuse the user's trust like that.

Uh, why?