I see two problems:
1. The "Government Orwellian" problem ( which has a bunch of sub problems) (it will be a "Corporation Orwellian" anyhow)
2. unnecessary inefficiency, it will fail because in a free market a better design than the "Global ID" system will prevail, the resons we have "Deb turd money" now is because of the threat of military and Orwellian police state, (and the lack of any alternative) - given a more efficient alternative and it will eventually become the system.
No i don't think hardware wallets are infallible, but that of course is irrelevant.
I would only trust a hardware wallet with small amounts of money in it. And I wouldn't want to manage my own cold storage. Maybe deterministic wallets will be good enough. But even that is a bit shaky:
"The problem is this: although you certainly can securely hand out child keys with no risk to the parent key, and you can hand out master public keys with no risk to the master private key, you cannot do both at the same time. The exploit for when that situation does arise is actually quite simple, and can be done with two lines of pybitcointools code." --
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/8396/deterministic-wallets-advantages-flaw/I'm not so worried about Orwellian ID systems. The main problem as I see it is that it will take many years for such system to become a reality. Unless, some clever open source project can achieve both user IDs and anonymity in a secure way.