Or starting with a fresh new PC can be a really refreshing experience.

Hopefully those people will learn to get contract support for continued drivers, as part of future purchases, or since it's needed for the hardware, won't use that computer for 'normal' computer things, ie save personal data on it, or browse the web with it.

Given all of the hoops that the users in the article describe what they have to do to stay on XP, that sounds like a whole lot of work. If you want real security on any computer, don't run as the Administrator.

The maker can say how long he's going to give a crap about how long he's going to care about you using his product. Once that time passes it will be considered 'end of life', not because it stops functioning at that second, but because it's just a matter of time until it stops functioning. Manufacturers say how long a warranty is: ie, the amount of time they'll work to ensure that the product behaves as advertised. Once that time passes they don't care any more.

I'm not saying that Windows has more capability than Windows, what I'm saying is that there's a different expectation of a baseline. One just expects certain things to be part of every installation of Windows. Even though things can be added later, the majority of users expect anything from any SKU to be there whenever they sit down at a Windows machine and tries to do something. I'm sure you saw the whoop and holler that happened when they announced that Windows 8 wouldn't come with DVD software. Even if the vast majority of Windows installs didn't use it, and it's available as a paid add-on, it still causes much consternation to many people thinking that something might not be there.
I don't know if you ever sat down at somebody else computer that had a starter or home edition of Windows, tried to do something, only to find that it didn't exist in that SKU. You probably muttered under your breath and shook your fist towards Redmond because of they created the SKU that existed on that computer, in Microsofts attempt to reduce the 'bloat' of specific Windows installs.

Can you point out a public location of that promise?

The maker.

I think that's one of the problems that Windows has. You were able to setup a specific device for a specific purpose. If there's anything not related to "multimedia desktop" you made sure it wasn't part of the device. If your parents try to do anything on that computer and they can't they'll just say "Well, this device wasn't made to do this". But with a Windows computer, everyone expects it to do something different. Windows has to deal with a really large baseline of functionality because it's expected to do that. Windows Server is different where there's more and more of turning on one feature at a time and having different SKU's with different feature sets, but the client OS can't pull that off.

It's possible that wants sell better than needs.

Internet Explorer has a feature called Tracking Protection which allows you to disable third party content on websites. It lists out all third party elements that you frequently see and allows you to disable them. That way you can block Facebook from all websites, which aren't Facebook.

Storage and Spam filter.

What's wrong with searching?

Why would it be a disaster? If the reason would be "a street would never be in the state of not being torn up!" I'm sure that a competent local government could write laws and regulations that say "A section of street can only be under construction X% of the year, and fines will be implemented against any work that goes beyond the permit date". And then yes, streets might get torn up a bit more, but given that most streets are under repaired in the US right now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Plus, it's not like there are hundreds of ISP's covering every little town. Ideally we'd have local municipalities realize that they should install the last mile of cable, and then make it property of the home, but for some reason that never happens.

What if the worker productivity isn't due to anything the workers have done, but from capitol investments the employers have made to increase their employee's productivity?

Lol!
All that would really encourage is people not using the website. If Kellogs.com customer loyalty reward website assigned me a ginourmus password, using characters I don't think I could even find on my phones' keyboard, it would encourage me pretty quickly to not use Kellogs products and seek out the competitors product (which would have a more reasonable password policy) when the difference was negligible to me.