I can see software sellers in the EU using it as an excuse to bundle a version of IE with their software. Quite a lot of software requires a minimum version of IE. It will quickly become different versions of IE, and they won't miss the opportunity to customise it with their own crapware too. Don't be surprised if MS offer IE for bundling with other apps as well, some of which might end up installed as trial versions on new PCs. Then there will be the shady accounting practises from the PC sellers, suggesting that the income they get from the crapware covers the cost of the MS licence, and look, nothing has changed. If the EU wanted to get serious, they should insist that all PCs are sold with the OS as an optional item in the package - an option you don't have to pay for if you don't want it. I think MS have diverted their attention from this aspect of PC sales quite successfully with the fallout from the browser wars last century. Perhaps that was what it was all about from the start.

Shouldn't number 4 be:

4. Industry as a whole who buy or bury politicians until they can no longer sell old technologies.

I'd go with this idea for the hardware. Industrial Atom based PC with no fan and running of a single 12v power supply - it will be easy to get 12v for some years yet. Something like the (soon to be available) Intel D945GSEJT would do the trick. That shouldn't be very expensive either, so buy spares. On the software front, if you can get what you want to run on a suitable linux distribution, you could burn a bootable image of the system to CD or DVD, and use that from CD, DVD, USB stick or even in a virtual machine if the software you choose isn't too heavy on resources on an Atom based board, plus doing that regularly will sort out backups. Pick a linux distro which is going to be around for a long time (Debian anyone?) and application software which stores things in an open format which you'll be able to read in some years time. Peripherals you're going to have to treat as consumables, as none are built to last 15 years nowadays unless you pay big money, but USB is likely to still be around in one form or another for quite a while. If USB3 ends up backwardly compatible, that should see out several years.

If its minimalist, it has to be this: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/ Chess for a computer with 1K RAM, including the operating system!