MSDN-AA style next time?

I can't understand this obsession with physical media these days. Microsoft has a wonderful system for MSDN-AA, which I get through my school (took a few days for the school techs to reply to my e-mail though). Simple website with a checkout system, I place windows 7 32 bit and 64 bit in my cart, checkout, they get added to my software list, with a link to a downloader and the cd-keys listed. Bonus points for allowing me to use the install images I downloaded from the P2P network my school chums have set up. I had windows 7 running on both my machines before I even had the website login (yay for 30 day trials).

Most people can burn a DVD or copy and install from a usb key these days. Windows 7 is easily the easiest to install from USB (extract disk image to clean drive), so you don't even have to burn a disk. Why is it so hard for companies obsessed with not sending out install media (I've un-borked so many computers because of messed up recovery partitions, one which wouldn't let me install from the recovery disk I actually made, because the recovery partition was missing), to set up a similar download system? Follow the Blizzard model and you can even make the images P2P, and it won't even strain your network.