Why is it great? Apple is worse than MS in so many other ways. In a few years you are going to see Apple being the person that everyone hates. Now, people seem to like it.
Regardless of where they handle the accounting on their end, cost of ownership has gone down.
There's NO question that the W8 upgrade pricing is a DIRECT result of Apple's usual $40 upgrade pricing.
BTW: Lets see how easy it is to update WXP to W8 - a single click in the Microsoft Store?
Microsoft knows that people will have little incentive to migrate from Win7 to Win8, so they are doing all they can to encourage that. This is not a response to Apple's pricing structure.
Macs are some of the best windows laptops out there. Tons of places buy MBPs then install windows.