Exactly. HTTPS relies on a centralised CA infrastructure, which is probably (indirectly) under the control of government anyway, so I don't see how taking away the ability to MITM plain text connections will help; and governments would prefer that their exploits be done over HTTPS since a properly-forged certificate will look "secure", and that makes the end-users more likely to blindly trust the authenticity of the content they download... it also means that firewalls and other systems designed to detect suspicious content in traffic (as much as they're derided for being used for censorship-related purposes, ones under the control of the user can be beneficial) won't catch the exploit either. I think that would be even worse.
HTTP causes some suspecion of the content, but HTTPS gives the impression of being secure, decreasing the level of suspicion while implicitly forcing the user to trust the CAs.
HTTPS with self-signed certificates that are exchanged in-person would probably provide the most secure authentication, but that doesn't really scale.
Either that or most Windows users still just habitually click through security warnings, which I sincerely hope is no longer the case.