Sometimes I laugh at arguments like this, sometimes I get pissed of. You are seriously disconnected from reality if you think this will change anything except all laptops having a front webcam. I haven't seen one without it ever anyways
The point however was Microsoft imposing unnecessary hardware requirements, and my comment stands since from a Linux (BSD, whatever) point of view, lots of Windows users ditching their perfectly good few years old PC means a huge load of good hardware to be taken almost for free since our demand would never match the huge offer.
Regarding messing with hardware requirements, I seem to recall Microsoft did a similar thing when they dictated that netbooks up to a certain size could not have more than this CPU and that amount of RAM to be eligible for receiving discounted OEM XP copies; it was called ULCPC or something like that. In that case they didn't set the minimum bar, but the maximum one. Which of course also produced tons of garbage since netbooks too slow or non upgradeable over 1 Gig RAM became hard to use with Linux too.
The point doesn’t stand since there won’t be some exodus of users switching to Linux.
None of my friends or likey acquaintances who aren’t programmers or in related fields including a handful who sometimes or frequently keep up with general tech/gadget news, can tell you a Linux distro name. They likely can’t tell you what a distro is. I’m sure if I was to say Ubuntu they would say yes they have heard of it of are a bit familiar, but that’s the extent of it.