Ron Minnich of LinuxBIOS and CoreBoot fame has been pointing out for years that (U)EFI is a huge byzantine horror designed to be as proprietary and closed as possible.

For more see this posts:

http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2010-October/0608...

http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2010/06/03/one-week-plus/

Fun fact: Itanium systems were the first to ship with EFI.