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IMO the article was written with the intention of exploiting existing paranoia among the ebook reading community, expecially those who acquire their books legally.
Serious pirates will look at this and laugh.
Worst case, if they destroyed your computer to a smoking ruin, in which case, you would possibly see the warning message, you could buy a new computer, and lie low till the dust settled. If you absolutely had to pirate, you could do it at the library or buy a really cheap computer/tablet for this purpose. If they got you twice, then their would be a lot of computers going down and possibly more than a few law suits launched by smoking computer owners.
If they lock down the computer, would a serious pirate meekly call the publisher and buy the book? Would they turn themselves into a law enforcement agency? Perhaps instead they would simply reformat their hard drive, or restore from a known good backup. An inconvenience to be sure, but not the end of the world.
And as others have already said, it would raise a great cloud of righteous indignation, hacker groups would become involved and the content owners/distributers would possibly be subjected to attacks on their systems.
To me, and I am not a lawyer, it seems that every person who recieved a warning, should be prosecuted if any are. I know that this is not how it works at present, but if you threaten say 100,000 people with prosecution , then you should be prepared to carry through with these threats or be percieved as ineffectual.
Can the publishers afford the legal costs of prosecuting more than a small percentage. Can they regain the cost of the lawyers and researchers, tech people etc. by suing a person or 100,000 for the cost of an ebook plus damages? And if they just go after the massive downloaders, can they expect many of them to be able to afford to pay if they do win.
It is pretty well a situaltion of trying to punish the pirates, not recouping lost profits, and if the publishers are stupid enough to think this will benifit them long run, well it will likelybe less successful than other attempts by other media providers in the past.
Not advocating piracy, but I do not see this sort of fear mongering doing anything to reduce it.
Helen
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