You don't have to buy these machines. If you choose to buy it, you've bought a Windows 8 machine and have paid for it. It's not like MS promised you a dual-bootable machine and sold you a single-bootable machine. You know what you're getting, and you can choose whether or not it fits your needs.
Microsoft isn't known for playing nice & allowing competitors to compete fairly. So yes there will be choice, but relying on that as a justification is pretty risky imo. Esp considering MS's standard MO and history.
I hate MS just as the next guy. But Open Thinking (tm) people should no seek freedom (as in speech) through restricting other's (namely, MS) freedom. They have the right to do what they feel like, and we have the choice whether or not to buy them.
We also have the right to make waves and be loud about the abusive, monopolistic behavior of Microsoft and Apple. http://jailbreakingisnotacrime.org
In this sense the political fight is for our freedom, not a restriction of their sales. If they do sell crippled devices, we'll just do everything we can to make that crippling public, including jailbreaking the devices to show that the emperor(s) have no clothes: DRM is a logical impossibility except through security by obscurity which is no security at all when the person trying to get in (jailbreak the device) has complete physical control over it.
No one has a guaranteed right to profit (the economic kind of profits).
Criticism is not the same as attempting to restrict Microsoft's freedom. Telling others "these guys placed an arbitrary limitation on their product to hinder competition; you should not do business with them" is the free-market way to influence a company's behavior.
I completely agree, and that's what I personally do. I just disagree with some people's opinion that 'Microsoft has no right to do such and such, it's my device. I bought it and so I can do whatever the hell I want to do with it'.
That's not exactly what the grand-grandparent was saying, and I'm not against what he says; I just wanted to add my comment (which I thought would be downvote to oblivion, but funnily, has now a double-digit vote count!!)
Not when they have the market power to influence the market in a manner that restricts the freedoms of everybody else.
I get that ideally everybody should be allowed to do what they want, but that approach is no good when you're dealing with a company that effectively has a monopoly.
