Have you ever seen a Dell Quote?? 600 bucks to even get a motherboard and another 200 to have a service technician see your machine on-site. That's alot of money when you got IT budgets in a chokehold with people doing whatever cheap manuever they can, can't blame a great OS like Windows 8 on the mis-marketed sales semester. Blame it if anything on how high the overall units cost versus meeting up with a guy like myself who will go on Ebay, figure out what technology is upgradable for cheap and doing the freebie route? I'm good with that, I get my dept pissed off since they to me, spend too much even at retailers like Sam's Club and Best Buy who are just moving DELL's and HP's units anyways. Their customer service reps when you call them, even suggest the best option for your personal needs. It's really businesses doing the big spending to keep active directories up to par for workplaces,etc.
I just don't want to hear that DELL and HP are putting the blame on Microsoft, you could market your units with RHEL, or another OS, but would it even do 1/2 as well? Nope.