it will be the most free Intel laptop with a modern chipset available.

How will it be any more free than the laptops listed here[1]?

    Any modern Intel computer needs the Intel ME.

My reaction to that is to evade modern Intel like the pest. I wonder if I’ve enough company in this reaction to be noticeable for the people at Intel who listen to money.

[1] http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards#Laptops

For one thing, Intel Boot Guard is disabled unlike many other modern Intel laptops, allowing you to modify the firmware in the first place. I think this is more important than being "100% FOSS" or the like.

All the laptops that can run coreboot also have no Intel Boot Guard or equivalent function, which couldn’t be disabled by the user.

I remain with the conclusion that Purisms marketing is deceptive, borderline lying.

Yes, my point is that the only modern Intel alternative I know of without Boot Guard is Chromebooks.

Or AMD? (I don't know the state of AMD firmware/microcode - but they do at least still offer amd64-compatible CPUs that are not Intel).

Since Kaveri AMD started building in the "Platform Security Processor". That's an ARM core that provides Trust Zone feature (ie. "make Hollywood trust your computer, despite you, the user"). Its code is signed as well.

About the same time they also stopped releasing source code for hardware initialization.

So along that axis they're not significantly better or worse than Intel nowadays. (I guess you can get by with a smaller firmware, and they allow redistribution, which are both nice, but not very relevant for freedom or security purposes)