I agree with your analysis though: there is a difference between parody and stupid, and this hits the latter. I've been building Win7 PC's for years and I haven't loaded to messed up graphics and no networking since before the friends and family beta. That was always a hallmark of WinXP, not 7.
The only thing I can think of is that he installed Win7 on 10 year old hardware and the drivers for such an antiquated setup weren't even included in the default set.
It's also possible that he grabbed a really old copy of Win7 with no service packs or updates baked in, which includes tons of driver updates.
However, and I run Ubuntu, Mint and Win7 on my machine, I can say that both found all of my drivers immediately and worked, although the Windows drivers are newer, more stable and more fully featured (I'm looking at you ATI).