I have no evidence for this but you can imagine someone at Microsoft saying "Dell has started selling laptops without Windows! We need to run an 'information campaign' to tell people why they should not use Ubuntu! Let's cough 'find' a college student who lost everything because of this operating system and then feed it to a local news channel."

I can't say if this happened, but the whole story sounds like a dark PR campaign to spread fear about Dell's choice and try to take some steam out of their rollout. Microsoft obviously had a lot of money on the line if Dell found success with Ubuntu.