So that the machines could only run Windows, and open source systems that put in the extra effort for OF on ia32? Apple would still have figured out how to make the original Mac Pro obsolete after however many software versions, and would probably still have implemented it wrong anyway.

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Open Firmware can emulate BIOS in much the same way as EFI. The OLPC, for example, uses Open Firmware with a BIOS emulator to run Windows. Linux and UNIX already work thanks to Sun (Oracle.)

At least as it stands, you can choose between Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris, Linux, BSD, bare-metal hypervisors, etc.

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I don't know much about hypervisors, but everything else on your list would run just fine with Open Firmware. I'm not talking about going gack to PowerPC, I think the switch to Intel was smart. But not sticking with Open Firmware is very annoying.