This has potential
Intel just want to sell more new chips.
But this does give users a hope to better security, only if done right. If they manage to keep the hypervisor tiny it will be much more difficult to attack. Just as it would be more difficult to find vulnerability in a Hello World program comparing to Flash.
Some related researches if you are interested.
- http://www.eecs.umich.edu/virtual/papers/king06.pdf: first idea of crafting virtualized rootkit
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(malware): implementation of the idea
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/mavmm/: tiny VMM to remain hidden to malware running above