While there is no doubt you are correct that a baseband attack is possible, it's a much, much harder task for a Telco to get control of your baseband, start poking around in it and reading your private messages via this channel. Has there been any released code that exploits this?

They easily have the technology now to read all your SMS and capture all the data you send. If you can crypt this, you're much better off from a privacy and security perspective than if you don't.

That's what's important about this announcement.

Your BIOS might be spying on your, or your hard disk, or your wifi card, your video card.

This offers good, strong protection for a lot of the attacks your data can be subject to. Not every attack, but the majority.