That's something I'd definitely look into.
Not specifically to run a different operating system, but because Windows and DOS have plenty of utilities to dump the BIOS of a machine, while I don't think OS X has any (because it doesn't use BIOS at all). It'd be interesting to look at it and see exactly what's different (and also keep it for archiving: we're already lucky enough that these machines survived at all, since they were supposed to be returned to Apple, if something goes wrong and the motherboard dies this software is gone forever).