Preloads? Schmeeloads.

To get a cheap Linux laptop, you buy a Windows one. Software manufacturers will actually pay hardware people to get their <del>trash</del> Valuable Merchandise preloaded on their boxes. This makes hardware cheaper. So you buy one of these boxes, boot it up with the Umbongo CD already in the drive, scrub the disks from top to bottom (Recovery partition? What's that for?) and soon you'll have a system that's usable.

You get a cheap box that's so ridiculously overspecced that even Vista runs on it, the software peddlers get the warm fuzzy feeling that someone out there may be using their junk, Microsoft gets another Imaginary Happy Vista User. Everybody happy!