Here's a bold plan that will kill two birds with one stone: Buy Canonical, throw the bulk of your $300 Million at their development, poach/cajole/trade for every UX guru not employed by Apple, and create a killer Linux desktop OS to go along with that ultrabook. It will scream, it will run a battery all night long and beg for more, it will have no "hells" (.dll, dependency, driver, symbol, whatever "hell" is inherent in Windows and Linux), it will run a plethora of online apps and services, and it will host a complement of installed applications that take care of 95% of a mainstream consumers needs.
No need to install flash, it's already there. Need to play an .mkv file? No problem when VLC is installed by default. Netflix on demand? At your fingertip. Amazon mp3 store embedded in banshee? Sure, why not? Writing a term paper or presentation? LibreOffice to the rescue.
Reinstalling Windows should not take more than 15 minutes, it should require no user-interaction, and it should leave the data partition alone. The data partition is where users images/photos/videos/music go. Intel should work with MS to ensure that executables do not run from this partition. If my mom downloads a virus, she shouldn't have to call me to fix it. Hardware DEP hasn't done much to stop viruses. Intel needs to come up with hardware features to remedy root-kits without my assistance.
Intel thinks of itself as one of the hardware makers with competitors. It makes CPUs, like AMD or Samsung. It makes boards like MSI or ASUS. This is red ocean. It needs to make its own blue ocean and of all the companies in the PC industry, it is actually capable of doing that. Instead of offering $300m to others, it should put $3B into creating the single Ultraboard that any PC seller can build a case around and sell tens of millions of these. Dell can't do it. Sony can't do it. Intel can. Just like Apple did.