That may be true, but there is clearly an argument against that premium manifacturer being the already giant corporation that licenses the os run on 95% of those machines. If it were startup I'd say 'more power to them', even if they only shipped machines with windows preinstalled.

You've got a point there, but I don't see this as a huge deal if they don't begin to abuse their position. Which they might, but I'll reserve my judgement until there's something to judge.

Fair enough, I don't judge the Surface machines as something bad per se, I simply don't pine for a world were the only decent hardware to run Windows is made by MS (which the too often abysmal quality of other OEMs may lead us to). Maybe I'm being a little paranoid, I guess.

FWIW, I would argue something similar wrt the Apple tv: abusive practices or not, I would not be happy to see one of the world's wealthiest corporation become a key player in yet another market (if anything because of Apple's sketchy history wrt to open formats).

Dell has some premium, business-class laptops.

Strong premium hardware makers would be nice, but not if they're Microsoft, because their hardware is necessarily tied to their crappy keylogger-infested OS.

And how exactly would other manufacturers compete with MS hardware anyway, while still offering MS's software on them? They'd be doomed to failure since MS can just jack up the price of Windows for them, so you'd be stuck with a single HW/SW maker, and back to a PC monopoly or something pretty close to it (since so much business software still requires Windows).

If you want healthy competition for PC hardware, it's never going to happen if MS takes over that space. Of course, it seems to be going downhill anyway, so I'm not sure what the solution is, but between the hardware makers throwing in the towel or crappifying their products, Windows becoming worse than ever with Metro and spyware and reported incompatibility with existing software, and lack of inroads for Linux into the OS space to provide some real competition (partly because of application compatibility, and partly because of too much fragmentation esp. for desktop environments; thanks a lot Gnome team), things are not looking good.