They're pitching to the average fellow who really could care less about how it works, just that it does work.

I've heard rumors about Longhorn (next Windows) and about how IE is going to be integrated into the system... they seem to slowly be moving toward having everything integrated. (A big fat .. .DUH! to that one :P )

With the added DRM issues, I probably won't purchase Longhorn either, BIOS issues or not.

i thought ie was already ingegreated?

Not really. IE is a seperate program, and Windows likes to use it, but it's not really integrated.