You may want to read that in more detail, also the AC above you should read this too.

TPM is required if boot device encryption is used and supported by the UEFI bootloader.
TPM is also required if the device supports ConnectedStandby (a funny new power management method that makes Windows devices behave like mobile phones with a sleep button that keeps it connected in the background but mostly powered down).

It is not a requirement of Windows 8.1 generically.

That being said:
Most vendors will ship all but their cheapest machines with TPM chips.
Most vendors of convertible tablets are supporting connected standby and thus have to ship with TPM chips.
All of Microsoft's reference machines ship with TPM and even better ship with bitlocker enabled on the system drive out of the box, and setting it up with a boot password is trivial 3 button presses in the Bitlocker Drive Encryption tool in the control panel.

TPM is here to stay and it's only being value engineered out on the cheapest and nastiest of devices.

Because the OS provides only a very limited subset of functionality which most vendors include in their equipment.

Driver updates would require working with the OS vendor and Windows Update (actually this is one part I wish would happen).
Display management is frankly poor on the OS. Windows does not provide for strange resolutions, forced outputs, separate colour controls for hardware overlays, or any 3D settings at all.
Power Controls is another thing where every vendor has their own idea of how to improve power consumption. The OS has no native understanding of dynamic brightness adjustment, and selecting which devices can go to sleep is a windows 2000 era dig through the device manager which no users would undertake.

Basically they write the tools because they have to.

Conversely I bought guitar hero and 2 guitars. I only had to put in 10 minutes setting up the profile but that was all it took to start two of us playing pop songs and sounding good in the process. Not to mention the competition kept things very fun and entertaining and we didn't annoy the neighbours with the "learner player" sound because even if you don't play the music doesn't sound bad.

As for your experience there's two likely explanations:
1. You are a musical freak of nature. Some people are. My girlfriend's sister is the type who can pick up an instrument and start sounding good within hours, but she's also at a musicians college and has been playing since she was big enough to hold an instrument.
2. You're no where near as good as you think you are and have a really over inflated opinion of what is considered "good". I know people who have been playing for years who don't sound good and would have trouble playing in a band or playing any song that isn't in an entry level learners book.

I would go recommending your path to anyone based on your experience. It's not the normal experience.

The alternative is asking for bankruptcy. Running communications lines is about the most expensive part of any telecommunications / power infrastructure. This is one area where doing the minimum possible is the only financially sound move.

People will complain no end about service interruptions, but will complain even more when their bills or taxes go up as a result of mitigating the disruptions.

Funny you mention China, given that iOS has less than 20% of the market share there. Isn't 20% that magical evil number you quoted earlier? If I were targeting the Chinese it most definitely would not be iOS. And no the carrier and manufacturer's app stores are not the way you get apps in China. There are dedicated 3rd parties running app stores run by the likes of news companies and Tencent (the company behind the hugely successful QQ chat program). Also with 2 app stores you target some 90% of the Chinese user base crapping on anything you can achieve there in the iOS app store.

Ever wonder why there are so many more Chinese apps on Android? You should come over hear and live here for a while before being an expert on one of the largest countries with the largest Android market share.

And the Streisand effect at work.

Which makes no difference to 99.99% of software vendors out there. Most 32bit programs run just fine on a 64bit platform. You make it sound like it's a real hard piece of work maintaining support for multiple platforms. That may be true only if your application has a specific need to run in 64bit.

That depends entirely on it's use. As a tool to confirm the identify of communication with other people, the number of other people using it is most definitely directly related to its usefulness. Likewise this. A cryptographically secure way of authenticating the sender of a message would be very useful, more so a way of encrypting it in transit.... if the sender used a compatible standard to do it.

Tell it to the people who upgraded to Gnome 3

So the flat style makes it harder to click on?

Know who else is licenced? Every road user. For some reason we ask taxis to get two licences.

So 32bit and large memory addressing is a problem for an low power low performance device?

I have 2 Atom machines here. I guarantee they'll never see a workload where they would benefit from a very large addressable memory space that comes with 64bit processors as the chips just aren't powerful enough to do that kind of work.

So really what is the point of a 64bit chip like that?

Faster is not an apples to orange comparison. It is a simple workload type question. I open a photo in Lightroom which processor does it the fastest? The current generation i3? Yesterday's generation i5, or yesterday's generation i7 mobile chip?

The problem is that it really should be an apples to apples comparison and the feature set should be separated from the performance.

What consent? I find the vast minority are pictures taken without consent. The majority are:

a) In public where there's no right to privacy and thus no consent (e.g. passed out on the sidewalk after a hell of a fun night)
b) In private due to own stupidity (e.g. Naked selfie sent over the internet, or sent to third party).
c) With consent withdrawn at a later date and then complaining about being unable to reverse the Streisand Effect (i.e. amateur porn from ages ago, or that picture you took 10 years ago you wish you didn't).

The problem is not so much a lack of consent, but that people will openly consent to waaay too much without thought about consequences and ultimately with little recourse when it all goes wrong. Yes this is blaming the victim, and you are right that there are plenty of assholes out there that prey on these kinds of victims, but as a society we are beginning to show an unrealistic expectation of privacy, as the media* and the Streisand effect shows over and over again.

*Side note I always laugh at the people who come out of the courts and then assault a news camera man because they think they have the right to privacy walking down a public street, only to end up right back in court again.

There's not. There are many SIM card manufacturers. This one just happens to be one of the most popular, and it's helped along by the fact that all you really need is one client (a Telecom company) and you suddenly end up with millions of units of sale per year.