There's no real winning move here that doesn't open them up to Chinese framework clones on Alibaba in a month
Arguably if the Chinese wanted to, they could've already beaten Framework to the market. All the major OEMs/ODMs are in China (or Taiwan, but let's not get political here...) and I'm almost willing to bet Framework just contracted this work out to one of them. Also, those OEMs/ODMs are very much capable of taking the Intel reference design schematics and fitting them into the requested shape. That's basically how things like the Thinkpad X62 happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274644
Arguably if the Chinese wanted to, they could've already beaten Framework to the market. All the major OEMs/ODMs are in China (or Taiwan, but let's not get political here...) and I'm almost willing to bet Framework just contracted this work out to one of them. Also, those OEMs/ODMs are very much capable of taking the Intel reference design schematics and fitting them into the requested shape. That's basically how things like the Thinkpad X62 happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274644