This totally wouldn't have happened to highly anticipated downloads from Firefox or Apple, which can push their terabytes through pipes made of sheer cool.
If I had to take a quick guess, it's because Akamai charges by the bandwidth. While your (paid) MSDN account supports the Akamai charges, the general public will just get leftover bandwidth from various services which is 'free'.
I'm running Win7 from MSDN here. Honestly if you're on Vista SP2 (pre-release) then there not enough difference in Win7 to waste the upgrade time. (Vista SP2 seems to be pretty stable memory wise - no more swapping/disk grinding for me).
Also note, if you have an older ATI video card you may need to boot into safe mode and remove the old drivers to make the screen readable. I had to run the 2nd half of the install blind (it really is beta).
Final note: watch your MP3's - check the release notes. Seems the install damages them.
I'm sure their legal team has solid justifications for it. What happens if you can grab it from torrent? There is no agreement between you and Microsoft that you do not own the product or have other rights. The firmly accepted way have a legal agreement is to get an agreement. So no torrent.
Maybe, but I think the bigger issue is that the left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing. Microsoft has a viable bit torrent surrogate which would allow them to force a EULA up front:
When Vista's beta came out, MS ran into the same problems. So someone put up a torrent of the iso (On legaltorrents.com i think) and linked to MS's site saying to go there for serials and to file bugs. MS still sent the legal team after it to have the torrent shut down fairly quickly.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/17/its-firefox-3-world-rec...
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Mac-fans-overload-...