And I am not knocking JTAG over USB. It is certainly convenient and beneficial since you can enable it in production or deployed units. I was commenting on how the GP (and even article) was making it out to be missing capability. They just do not have the cheap tools that are the intended way to access that capability.

edit: The article even mentions how the "Qualcomm Landing Team at Linaro", which seems to be the team that works with pre-production hardware to get them working on launch day, has a development process where "debuggers have never been a staple of our work for all the typical reasons you'd expect (cost and complexity being the main ones)". That is literally the team that should have pre-production units in the lab which will have debug connectors and where JTAG probes should be par for the course, yet they are apparently hardly using them partly because of "cost".

On Pixel devices, the UART is not configured or brought up by default in locked production mode (as things should be), but by unlocking the device and then using `fastboot oem uart enable` you can flip the bits to turn it on. On early Pixel devices it was on the headphone jack and on newer ones it's on the SBU pins.

By default I think it's still configured as the kernel console in the kernel command line, so once it's enabled it will show the kernel debug output and present a TTY. But of course you can subsequently configure it to do whatever you'd want a UART for: kgdb for kernel-debugging, earlier stuff in the bootloader, and so on.

So, the implications are just: there's a convenient debugging interface available to you that turns on if you unlock the device and ask for it.

On Chromebook devices there's a more complicated and fancy debugging system where the SBU pins can be muxed to the security processor's USB host interface by presenting a debug cable called a SuzyQ, which presents a whole suite of debugging facilities. This used to be used quite frequently for unbricking purposes.