Having said that, I take issue with almost every point you made:

* Both Chris Tarnovsky and Karsten Nohl have, supported so far as I know by none of the resources of a major university, given security conference talks on processes for "Turning silicon into machine-readable form". Nohl actually has an open source package to help do it. There's nothing incredible about that claim.

* I'm not sure I follow how the most famous act of computer-aided industrial espionage isn't germane to hardware backdoors. Researchers put their work into context so people outside the field will take it seriously.

* The military uses Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux, too, both of which are general-purpose packages. You think a universally distributed backdoor in either that had escaped detection until 2012 wouldn't be relevant to national security?

* Go read Tarnovsky's blog, where he has blogged about extracting keys from silicon.

The only point you've made here that I agree with is that the attack/activation surface of these illicit features is likely to be more important than anything else.