Think about it. You already have the hardware, meaning you paid for it, and intel earned a profit on it. They are not going to sell it to you at a loss hoping you'll later need some of the paywalled features.
Anything you pay later is just squeezing you like a wet rag, it's not like intel is providing a service for the payment, no this is at zero cost for them. It's as if your gas stove charged you money if you wanted to use all 4 burners at the same time.
It is utterly ridiculous and I'll not abide by it.
Either give the hardware for free and charge for usage. Or if you are making me pay up front for it, then don't even think about charging me for using features already in it.
That's not really how it works.
It's just an easier form of distribution.
It may cost Intel lots in engineering time to design and implement these features, but to implement them the chip coats them very little as it doesn't take much silicon.
The cost model could very much be based on them selling at a loss if no one buys the extended features, but knowing that on average a certain percentage of buyers will pay extra for the added feature, so on average they will see a profit.
Unless they get greedy, it allows them to offer their customers a lower cost entry point, while still allowing them a simple upgrade path.
Again, unless the base and unlocking costs are out of whack (it they turn it into a subscription model) there is nothing really wrong with this.
It's much like software, where the code already sits on your machine and you pay to unlock various features of it.
Intel would essentially be saying that the marginal cost of distributing these features to everyone is worth it if it allows for an easy upgrade later.
They are essentially adding additional stuff in for free that you can pay to unlock later.
