I am going to play devils advocate here, in as polite a fashion as possible (and by the way I am writing this on an iMac) I think that this is another thing that people who want to attribute sinister motives to Microsoft are going to continue to do so. As a computer hobbyist and also someone who works in IT I can see a lot of benefit. Malware is an enormous problem and I hate having to deal with users who don't really care or act smartly despite whatever level of training provided. Botnets are not a small issue and having thousand of zombie machines running windows is not a good thing. I also imagine that this will prevent bootleg copies of the OS to load and I applaud that.

Now lets also be fair about Macs, and yes I do own one. I can buy a legal copy of Mac Lion and I can not load it legally on anything other than Apple hardware. In fact Apple will and has come after people for that. Does anyone remember Power Computing? They made Mac clones until Jobs returned and clones were killed.

Yes, if you choose to view Microsoft as the evil empire there is little I can say that will change your mind. For Linux fans and Unix who can recite grep command line arguments in your sleep my hat is off to you. However for the average end user, even with a GUI, the OS is often to complex and they can not use the apps they want. Driver installation, for me, has been horrific at times.

So let us presume the good, and hope nothing nefarious is afoot. And if truth be told this would create a huge black eye in the media if it really happened. There are always places that sell bare bones machines as well and you can install your own HD.