Most of those manufacturers sell crappy products with bizarre bits of brain damage in otherwise good machines. E.g. awesome Sony laptop that's got 2 hours of battery life, or great Samsung device that's a fax-aluminum plastic piece of shit. I wouldn't even touch a PC laptop from someone other than Lenovo, and judging by everyone else's sales figures, I'm apparently not alone.

That's the real hope of Surface--to free us from OEM's and their OEM crapware and OEM brain damage. Microsoft has a lot of money, but even it can't buy the Chinese/Taiwanese OEM's taste.

There is just a powerful marketing pitch in being able to sell a product "this is the one true way Windows 8 was meant to be experienced." There is a reason everyone raves about the Nexus 4/7/10. Surface is the only Windows 8 tablet on the market that can go toe to toe with Apple in terms of industrial design and vertical integration. The success of Windows 8 tablets lives and dies with Surface.

I'm not sure that overstating your case is a sensible approach to argument. Lenovo is not the only company with good PCs, and a handful of PC companies sell more units than Apple, so clearly people do buy them. More than 300m a year of them, as a matter of fact.

However, your point on crapware is well made. Unfortunately, Microsoft can't do anything about it (because the DoJ sued it into the ground and specifically prevented it). Also, crapware brings in money and this is significant in a market that buys on price. I don't see it changing in the near future.