> It's really a pretty astonishing aspect of FireWire.

Not really. Note that LightPeak/Thunderbolt has the exact same issue. I believe it can be mitigated by the right IOMMU implementation (if the OS takes advantage of the feature).

I think this is a much better article to read, because it covers a variety of platforms, instead of grabbing headlines by talking about Lion, and it contains links to a variety of preexisting papers and tools, instead of regurgitating the contents of a press release