Isn’t this the idea of having a chipset (Northbridge/Southbridge) on the board, to handle some of these IO tasks?
Also, I recently saw the Cathode Ray Dude video on Dell’s Brain Slug, where down basically hijacked the system with a low-power ARM SBC. I almost wonder if something like this would be possible, it would obviously require a revision but it would theoretically allow for suspended downloads, invite notifications, etc. It would also be fairly expensive and complex though