I have a background in digital circuits and computer architecture, and I completely disagree with you that these SoC components should be run by the traditional

I have a background in digital circuits and computer architecture, and I completely disagree with you that these SoC components should be run by the traditional CPU cores. Most of these cores have strict latency guarantees or security boundaries that are much harder to achieve when you are trying to share silicon with the general-purpose code running on the machine, and since the cores are so small, it does not meaningfully save silicon to use them. OSes are generally terrible at providing strict latency guarantees. If you will crash the CPU if you don't do [X] every 10 microseconds, you should not be telling the operating system to do [X]. This is the case of audio systems, radio systems, PCIe, and almost every other complicated I/O function. These could all be done with hardware state machines, but it is better (cheaper) to use a small dedicated CPU instead. When I refer to security boundaries, a lot of people think that "security through obscurity" is the idea. It is not. It is more similar to closing all the ports on a server and applying "API security" ideas to hardware. It is a lot easier to secure a function that has a simple queue interface to the main cores than to secure a function that shares the main cores - Spectre and Meltdown have showed us that it might be impossible. Yes, these secure enclaves are used for DRM crap and other nonsense, so I can see why you might not like the existence of that core, but even if you erase the DRM software from that core and make it work for the user completely, you still will want the boundary. Not to mention that every modern motherboard these days has a board management controller, which cannot be part of the CPU, and controls power and resets. From a hardware perspective, these SoCs and motherboards really need to be heterogeneous systems. It's up to the system software to work with that. Heterogeneous SoCs really have nothing to do with taking power away from the user. The user can program all of these cores, but we live with abstractions that make it very hard.