I agree it's great you can get a PC without the crap installed but I think MS have to tackle off the root problem and have it so that's how they all come.
Seriously, you'd get a noticable performance increase on the average low end laptop right off the bat if they could do that.
My understanding of how that works (which I admit is an outsider's understanding) is that PC vendors subsidize the price of new PC's by installing crapware on them.
The race to the bottom in PC pricing basically left them scrambling to find ways to keep their prices low without gutting their already-falling margins.
I don't think Microsoft is in a good position to require PC's to stop doing this (unless they were willing to eat the loss of vendor revenue by lowering their Windows license cost, which would effect their own margin).
I'm left optimistic by companies like Lenovo, who are now marketing crapware-less machines as a competitive advantage (as a byproduct of their Rapidboot initiative), and hope maybe other vendors will try and compete.
I don't remember the last time I bought a Windows PC where the first thing I did wasn't to immediately wipe it and reinstall the OS from an OEM version, although it'd be nice not to have to do that.
EDIT: realized I started two comments in a row with "Yeah,". That makes me almost as angry as if I'd littered the comment with "like, you know"'s...sigh
I agree with every word, I just think for moderate users using mid-level or above machines, crapware is a big enough problem that MS should be being worried about the impact it's having on the public perception of Windows.
At least with Windows today, MS has their hands tied. Anything they do to push vendors will throw antitrust flags.
Their best bet, if this is their core concern, is to move to an app store model, and block these apps from ever making it into the store, so the OEMs can't install them to begin with. But honestly, that's not likely.
At the end of the day the market talks. If people truly value clutter free machines they'll pay for it and OEMs will respond.
Seriously, you'd get a noticable performance increase on the average low end laptop right off the bat if they could do that.