Could you give me some stats? I wouldn't expect a population to go and spend a lot of money on a CD to install Windows onto a marginally cheaper machine

My guess is that people will get their Windows install media from the same place they get their Blu-Ray rips.

But at least the sale counts as a Linux sale, which is positive.

I've also seen people that replace Mac OS X with Windows or Linux on their Apple laptops.

I completely forgot about people installing Windows on their Macs, even though anecdotally this is very common.

This can be easily observed in any Games Development Conference (GDC).

The obvious difference is that you cannot use FreeDOS for typical desktop activities (like surfing the web, reading mail, Facebook), whereas you can use Ubuntu for almost everything, except Gaming and Photoshop. From my experience with "normal" (non-techy) users, they don't bother switching OSes as long as they can use it for what they want to do, which is in many cases little more than running a browser.