merchants could for instance see the 2 pools playing hot potato. and instead the nodes decide to let them play hot potato between themselves and orphan and ban them.. the nodes then start solo mining or using their own asics and leaving the 2 hot-potato pools on their own minority network, ignored by all the nodes whereby the pools cant spend funds with those merchants/nodes
So they are miners then. Not non-mining nodes. You start to get it. And BTW, they just introduced an altcoin with a hard fork.