To provide a more useful summary:
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Playback / Functionality
Vista's mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content protection. If you've invested a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from a digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content. Same with video. Also, what you *do* have may be played in a highly degraded state, because the CP scheme won't permit high-end output of non-protected material.
"Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches."
Elimination of Open Source Hardware Support AND Unified Drivers
In order to prevent emulation of protected output devices, all hardware specs must be confidential. No opening up of APIs, or anything like that. And, since each device driver will need its own "fingerprint", to be identified as a "protected" device, each driver will have to be unique. In other words, if you buy a new nVidea card, you have to get a specific driver for it. If you change cards, you can't use the same driver, even if it is current - you have to get the driver for *that* card.
Denial of Service / Decreased Reliability
If driver gets compromised, MS can revoke the signature for that driver, and, thanks to automatic updates, that device is effectively disabled throughout the world, as soon as the update is applied.
ALso, devices must set "tilt bits" in the system, so that if anything seems *funny* the system can (and will) shut the device down.
Increased Costs
All this new crap means that hardware will be more expensive, so we can pay for the privilege of getting screwed. Also, much of the technology involved here is patented by 3rd party vendors, so royalties will have to be paid, which further increases the cost.
Increased Resource Consumption
In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, everything will need to be encrypted and/or authenticated. That chews up a *lot* of CPU resources. So much so, that other chips will have to take up the slack. For instance, there isn't enough CPU to decompress a high-end video stream, and encrypt the resulting uncompressed data stream toi the video card. So the card will have to do much of the decompression. Even a "low-end" graphics card will need to have decompression and codec support built in.
"The worst thing about all of this is that there's no escape. Hardware manufacturers will have to drink the kool-aid in order to work with Vista: "There is no requirement to sign the [content-protection] license; but without a certificate, no premium content will be passed to the driver". Of course as a device manufacturer you can choose to opt out, if you don't mind your device only ever being able to display low-quality, fuzzy, blurry video and audio when premium content is present, while your competitors don't have this (artificially-created) problem."
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