So the next question would be whether it's possible to remotely reconfigure the "non-vPro" machine to activate the features, in which case it could be considered a direct equivalent.
And that's what we don't and can't know the answer to since it's a black box. Hence, that circuitry can't ever be present on a machine if one is worried about potential compromises or subversions of it.
Derefr's answer in this thread suggests that you can insulate against this regardless of how the vPro activation works; not all motherboards support the parallel packet stream, so you can get a vPro incompatible motherboard and trust that even if there is a "wake and activate" command it won't be received.
Examine the binary for a run of the mill system sometime and check out the partition headers/manifest, see if you are convinced there are no networking functions in there. The processor in my laptop supports WoL (and I've tested that it works), but is not vPro (double-checked with Ark). I'm skeptical.
