Microsoft offering some PC vendors with highly discounted Windows does not change this.
I think that it does, because most people in history bought a PC from an OEM, and the rest of us could get an OEM copy if we wanted to. Having been a Mac user up into the 040 days, and then slightly again after that, I did always appreciate the fact that Apple wouldn't even in theory hassle you about making your own copies of the System disks. But: Apple wasn't giving you anything that it didn't make sense for them to give you, and they for most of history they've charged a substantial price premium and provided inferior performance. Even today, when they actually have impressive hardware for a time longer than the moment the G5 had in the sun, they still only excel up into the mid-range, but I have to admit they're killing it there.
I paid $100 for the last version of Windows I bought (the absolutely peak Windows 7 Pro x64, for what it's worth) and I got a legit system builder's license as I was building a potato of Theseus which has evolved into the big black cube-shaped 5900X I'm using now. I could run that Windows 7 in a VM today if I want to, and I occasionally do when I need to run some kind of programmer or something — just attach a hub to the VM to solve all the awkwardness. But I haven't run either Windows or MacOS except under protest since I discovered AmigaOS and Unix at nearly the same time, in 1991.