... most viruses require a constant high speed connection...
You must be new here - I'm young in internet years, but even I remember the number of viruses flying around in the days of floppy disks and dial-up modems, long before constant high speed connections...
Or simply temporarily leaving them behind? I'd leave my phone on the desk in my office if I was going to meet a contact I didn't want associated with me...
Yep, I see it more like the razor/blade "loss-leader" model, or the "first one's free to get you hooked" free-samples model, rather than the "freemium" model...
The CDC numbers are just re-prints of the Disease Outbreak News alerts from the WHO: http://www.who.int/entity/csr/don/archive/year/2014/en/index.html
It does do DNS setup (systemd-resolved)
Monolithic?
Postgresql runs a database server. That's it. Postgresql doesn't include a mailserver just because it needs to send alerts.
Apache runs an HTTP server. That's it. Apache doesn't include DNS and OCSP servers just because sites hosted on it will need name resolution and certificates.
OpenOffice, I'll give you that one. It combines multiple applications into one for historical reasons. I don't like it, but I don't use it so I don't have a dog in that fight.
Monolithic (in the sense used here) implies the combination of multiple essentially independent functions into a single application. Just because Apache and Postgresql are big applications doesn't make them monolithic.
"... with only minor loss of" the primary stated goal of the system?
Do not use the blue keys on this terminal.