The admin of a machine should have control over who submits hardware information about it to a central source. smolt's send profile app should only be runnable by root.
What's to stop somebody from getting/sending completely unprivileged hardware information to a smolt server anyway? Having smolt fail for non-root should not make this information any less available to somebody that wants to submit it.
The admin of a machine can do this after install if they wish, but to allow only root is an illusion as people could just download the smolt source and send it that way.
The difference is about of information disclosed and ease of use. Smolt makes it easy to reveal a lot of information about a box very quickly.
Still an illusion, lshal shows way more information about a box (things like service tag even)
lshal doesn't submit to a centralised database. Your "illusion" is broken. My issue is that smolt makes it simple for a person who does not own a box to submit information to a centralised place. The fact that they can download smolt, remove the suggested check for uid 0, then run it, proves my point - you've made it harder for them, which is the the point.
The illusion I'm referring to is admins thinking that if smolt is root-only runable that their profile won't end up in the database, because that's just not the case. Meanwhile I find it bad to run applications as root and never do it unless required.