Welp, real glad I bought a Z-series last year...
Yes, it's not the adware that's the problem, but the software for spying on all of your supposedly secure connections. They can read all your banking information, your passwords, etc. And the private key for their certificate is stored so insecurely that hackers have already harvested it and can use it to spoof trusted sites for their own phishing purposes.
I do have my laptop partitioned with Ubuntu and know how to use it...
See also Extracting the SuperFish certificate. A quick text search of the binary enabled this guy to extract the certificate's encrypted private key and the password needed to decrypt it. The password turned out to be "komodia", the name of the company that makes the man-in-the-middle attack software.