Microsoft won't support Vulkan officially, and apps would have to install their own Vulkan drivers.
"DATE: March 11, 2016" "-NEW- Intel® Vulkan BETA 15.40.20.4404 Graphics Driver for Windows® 7/8.1/10 [15.40]"
> https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/06/29/new-intel-...
"DATE: June 24 2016" "-NEW- Intel® Graphics Test Driver for Windows® 10 and Windows 7/8.1 [15.40.4473]"
https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/06/23/intel-open...
"In his blog published on February 16, 2016, Imad Sousou shared that Intel was selected as one of the leading graphics platform suppliers with Vulkan* 1.0 drivers certified by the Khronos Group Consortium."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsOTVpepS44
"We are demoing Intel’s implementation of the API available on the latest hardware from Intel on 3 major operating systems: Windows, Linux and Android." Intel Engineer: "This really shows the industry is moving towards Vulkan."
https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod...
Intel sure seems to have been making sure all of their chips are now Vulkan capable. All I can find for "they don't plan to" are what seems like rumors on one forum that are spawned by the current drivers being "unsupported" (but given that they are in beta, that makes sense to me: the storyline here is that they were provided for Vulkan developers to start testing their products and likely testing this driver). It really seems like Intel is at worst being "a little slow" to push Vulkan, but they are definitely not unsupportive.
In addition to what people have said about Intel, Qualcomm, ARM, and IMG are all behind Vulkan. Who else is making GPUs these days?
Maybe it'll be different for Vulkan, but that would be a surprise.
Besides, "purposefully cripple" is inaccurate. They just put more effort into Direct3D because there's no reason to support OpenGL as fully.
Is there any reason to believe that, unlike OpenGL, Vulkan drivers will be sufficiently widespread for browser vendors to use it on Windows?
The current Plan Of Record is that Intel® is not supporting Vulkan on Windows drivers. The drivers that were made available on Developer.com are intended for Vulkan developers.
So, it is expected that some Vulkan drivers may not work for end users.
So, they ARE planning full Vulkan support on Intel iGPUs.