FSF offers "GNU Bucks" for finding nonfree works in free distributions

Since the firmware code is interpreted by the CPU it is in practice fixable/workaroundable if there are problems. You just have to blacklist the pci-id, maybe checksum the methods, or whatever, to identify bad code and run something else instead (if you can discover what works). Something in this spirit is probably done with buggy ACPI code too.

Otherwise it's just an engineering tradeoff. Your goal is to make a stable hardware API that works the same regardless what GPU your board has, so that a new GPU can work with older version of drivers as well. The way ATI people went about to gain this goal was to have the GPU supply command stream for the CPU to interpret, rather than implement some region of memory that can be written to and is interpreted by the GPU to perform equivalent effect. To me, both solutions look pretty much identical. The AtomBIOS code should not be treated as non-free software, it's just instructions to drive the hardware supplied by the hardware to fill the contract of a stable hardware API.