Strong premium hardware makers would be nice, but not if they're Microsoft, because their hardware is necessarily tied to their crappy keylogger-infested OS.
And how exactly would other manufacturers compete with MS hardware anyway, while still offering MS's software on them? They'd be doomed to failure since MS can just jack up the price of Windows for them, so you'd be stuck with a single HW/SW maker, and back to a PC monopoly or something pretty close to it (since so much business software still requires Windows).
If you want healthy competition for PC hardware, it's never going to happen if MS takes over that space. Of course, it seems to be going downhill anyway, so I'm not sure what the solution is, but between the hardware makers throwing in the towel or crappifying their products, Windows becoming worse than ever with Metro and spyware and reported incompatibility with existing software, and lack of inroads for Linux into the OS space to provide some real competition (partly because of application compatibility, and partly because of too much fragmentation esp. for desktop environments; thanks a lot Gnome team), things are not looking good.
And how exactly would other manufacturers compete with MS hardware anyway, while still offering MS's software on them? They'd be doomed to failure since MS can just jack up the price of Windows for them, so you'd be stuck with a single HW/SW maker, and back to a PC monopoly or something pretty close to it (since so much business software still requires Windows).
If you want healthy competition for PC hardware, it's never going to happen if MS takes over that space. Of course, it seems to be going downhill anyway, so I'm not sure what the solution is, but between the hardware makers throwing in the towel or crappifying their products, Windows becoming worse than ever with Metro and spyware and reported incompatibility with existing software, and lack of inroads for Linux into the OS space to provide some real competition (partly because of application compatibility, and partly because of too much fragmentation esp. for desktop environments; thanks a lot Gnome team), things are not looking good.