Windows Refund day - reaction

[Jerry A Clabaugh]

Windows refund day, Feb 15 (Monday), has been generating an amazing
amount of hostility on feed-back news sites.  Ziff-Davis ran
a story with a talk-back section,
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2189833,00.html -
I'm just amazed at the anger and lack of comprehension in most
of the posts there.  Just today there was a response at LinuxToday
to an article (http://linuxtoday.com/stories/2985_flat.html)
which was disturbingly angry.

To me it all seems simple and obvious - you can't buy a pre-assembled
Intel-based consumer-level machine without paying money to 
Microsoft, whether you want or intend to use any Microsoft products.
Linux users are the ones most concerned with this, because they
are probably the largest segment of people for whom this is a
problem.  But even some NT users don't want to have to pay for
Win98 when they don't intend to use it.  

Why is there such an angry reaction?