I'd rather have my trackpad, sound, sleep/wake, graphics driver, etc ... work out of the box than to have an extreme degree of configurability.
You are right, this is my perspective, but for Dell it's also a matter of numbers. Which direction, if they can't do both now, will sell more laptops, cause fewer returns, etc.
And that's just the way I like it, because in the end (for me), its the only OS I can configure to such a degree that it lets me "just work".