Unfortunately not, the biggest change being "pure" UEFI-without-legacy-BIOS firmware that a lot of motherboards already have.
That and the question of drivers for OSs newer than DOS (which is not as big of a problem, since they can still be written and doing so is easier than changing the BIOS. The existence of USB drivers for DOS, and HD Audio for Windows 3.1x[1] are examples of that.)
Modern x86 CPUs are theoretically still backwards compatible, but I suspect they don't test things like 16-bit mode and VME[2] much anymore.
Those disturbingly happy articles should really be titled something like "the openness of the PC is about to end forever" --- because that was likely the end-goal all along.
These new machines are not PCs. It's not out of the question for some company to build a new BIOS-architecture machine in the future, though it will probably eventually require sourcing x86 chips from vendors other than the Big Two as crypto keys will probably be required to even boot the chip if they aren't already.
That and the question of drivers for OSs newer than DOS (which is not as big of a problem, since they can still be written and doing so is easier than changing the BIOS. The existence of USB drivers for DOS, and HD Audio for Windows 3.1x[1] are examples of that.)
Modern x86 CPUs are theoretically still backwards compatible, but I suspect they don't test things like 16-bit mode and VME[2] much anymore.
[1] http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?50867-Windows-3-1-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14328237