People think this is some sort of power play. It cracks me up that people think the gov't actually WANTS to run companies; that officials who are elected & in place for a relatively short period have some sort of interest in "corporate control," as though they didn't already have enough to worry about. It's paranoid (and Damo, trust me, you're one of the biggest paranoids about gov't power on this board).
It's a PR move. Though it's now becoming clear that TARP actually worked, and that we'd be in a much worse place without it, symbolic excesses & waste on the part of the recipients was undermining public opinion. It's not any more complicated than that.