Mr. Daley - forgive me for intruding into this topic, as Mr. Cole hasn't yet responded, but as a musician who hasn't (and won't) reached the heights that Lloyd Cole has attained (and who hasn't played at the number and variety of courses he has played), I figure I can still throw in a few words on this topic.
First of all, it doesn't seem to me, after reading those articles, that either of the proposed innovations make playing guitar easier, or mess with the integrity of playing the guitar. In the first case, they're looking for a way to make guitars sound better, and in the second, they're just slapping some existing computer communications technology on a guitar to facilitate......something. But making a cheap acoustic sound better won't do much to make anyone a "better" musician. I don't know if the golf analogy works for me here, in terms of "game improvement" and its effect on the integrity of music and musicianship.
A better analogy, to my mind, might be the advances in keyboard technology, to the point where you can hit one button, or a series of buttons, and the machine can create synchronized sounds that are pretty amazing. I was waiting in the keyboard room of a local music store a while back while a clerk was grabbing my order, and in 10 minutes or so I had five or six keyboards all humming away together in a relatively interesting, layered texture. It took very little musical ability to get that sound going, but if there hadn't been a bunch of computers back there synching things and creating sounds it would have been unbelievably laborious to create. It was, to my mind "too easy," and even though it sounded pretty cool, it certainly wasn't composition or there wasn't much creativity involved.
That said, there's a lot of music that I like out there that has elements that were likely created in much that same way, "noodling" around with a keyboard/computer. And when it comes to guitar playing and songwriting, there's a lot of music I love that would be scoffed at by "highly accomplished purists" - music that was created by folks that could easily be described by some as possessing "mediocrity of playing talent." There's ability there, something sometimes ineffable and defying categorization, that makes it enjoyable, or worthy, or necessary.
That, I think, for me, is where the golf analogy fails. In music, there's no scoring (well, point-wise anyway), and no "winners," per se. There might be a "money list," but the connection between that list and the ability of the people on it is to my mind not remotely so clear as it is in the game of golf. The playing field in music has certainly been leveled by technology to a certain degree, with great-sounding instruments and recording technology being more available to more people than ever before, but while mediocrities may have an increased opportunity to succeed, there's a lot of talented folks out there who are also getting their hands on this stuff and making themselves heard.
I'm not a good enough at golf, frankly, for hi tech advances in golf technology to really change things a whole lot for me. But in the hands of the best players the technology starts a chain reaction that results in great courses being marginalized or desecrated. Classical music may have been marginalized by the popularity of other musical forms, but we can still listen to it, pretty much exactly as intended, if we want.