It's been brought up elsewhere questioning the legality of this. Anti-trust authorities may question a monopoly requiring vendor lockout of competing products. In fact, they SHOULD question it.
Before anyone says Apple does the same thing, they don't. (I believe you can install other OSes on Apple computers but...) Apple only limits its own computers while Microsoft tries to restrict all hardware vendors to Microsoft products. "I won't sell to you if you aren't exclusive to me," has always been a determination of illegal monopolistic behavior and is what got Microsoft in so much trouble over the past decade and more.
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