SUSE and Secure Boot: The Details (SUSE Blog)

If hardware vendors want to prevent their boards being used for anything other than Windows 8, that's a thing they can do. They won't be able to sell those boards to anyone who wants to build Windows 8 certified systems and they'll be locking themselves out of the corporate market for the forseeable future, so it doesn't seem like a likely thing for them to do - it seems much more likely that whoever you're talking to just has no idea what they're talking about.