Massive Backtrack seems quite a hyperbole. I would just say adjusting to the new reality, where still millions of users are using W7 and this hardware, and let them without, at least, security updates, seems like a horrible plan.
Microsoft is trying to support users and usher them to a sustainable model for an OS delivery. The Win7 model and prior is clearly not sustainable, for a variety of reasons.
That Microsoft is having such trouble getting people to upgrade even when giving it away is troublesome. Not just for their bottom line, but for all of ours. Win10's model and tech represents a lot of concrete security improvements and stamping out old windows boxes will steadily reduce the number of trivially exploitable machines on the internet.
We really should be rooting for them to succeed at this.
Here are about 14 million search pages about the issue https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows%207%20wi...
Anyway to be clear - I don't need help keeping Windows 7 up to date. My (downvoted) point is that there are a lot of people out there running Windows 7 unaware that they are not fully updated, and hence under considerably greater risk.
In my own case (I realise this is anecdata) I only found out about the issue by trying to upgrade to Windows 10 and having that install hang. It happened on a workstation, laptop and virtual machine!
Microsoft promised support until 2020. It didn't promise "support until 2020 but only if you upgrade your hardware after 2016". Any other course of action would have gotten them a lot of bad press and some lawsuits.