If the HDD was clean, or fully zeroed, you were fine. If you were on top of this and had a plain MBR mainboard with protection from flashing the BIOS, there was no way the mainboard itself could contain any kind of malware. You can also leave as much space in between GPT partitons as you would like (this is not the factory default), and Windows built-in tools can do the job.
"Benefits" of GPT was that no sectors are unspecified, true but in practice sectors 5 through 31 are still never used unless you have created more than 8 GPT partitions on the HDD. Also an optional location for Windows Loader. This normally unused area between sector 0 and the first partition's boot sector was a good place for GRUB to routinely use for its bootloader but had also been a location for the occasional "rootkit" that could not be removed by reformatting or often even repartioning (you would have to zero that part of the HDD using ordinary non-Windows tools, like a disk editor or dd in Linux). One of the Microsoft claims was that one of the security "deficiencies" of MBR HDD layout not found with GPT was the unused sectors which padded the area from sector 1 up until the first sector of the first partition which is the partition's boot sector (usually up to sector 63 but at least sector 32 and sometimes 1024 or more). Now there is supposedly a hack that allows W7 to be installed on GPT volumes. Linux was not as much of a threat, but the collateral damage was not unintentional and set Linux PC and dual-boot approaches back at least two years. Seemed to me simply to make it more difficult to install W7 on all future PC's, which would turn out to be the main competition for W8 after all.
Therefore almost all PC's newer than the ones "designed for W7" would require not only a complete HDD refomatting, but a more extensive complete repartitioning (MBR-style) before anyone could even try to install W7 or anything else other than what the PC originally shipped with. GPT as "standard" and UEFI with Microsoft SecureBoot were then rushed out in time for the W8 release. It had recently become possible to bypass Windows 7 activation using "Windows Loader" (by DAZ), a sophisticated hacker tool which loaded the proper BIOS hardware key not from the mainboard, but optionally from a replaced MBR sector 0 on the HDD which then pointed to a file containing a copy of the original sector 0, from which the non-W7 MB then could boot W7 normally without needing activation. The page is long gone now but I definitely saved a copy because it was so blatant.
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