Ah. To be fair, that intel.com link is confusing, because it sends you off to see if you have "Intel® vPro", which is certainly on consumer hardware, like various i5 and i7 systems. Which does not jive with the earlier line "This vulnerability does not exist on Intel-based consumer PCs". It sort of depends on your definition of consumer hardware.
Overall, though, it does seem to validate the sequence was something like "he had a suspicion" then "intel released an update".