One could make the argument that they have a pretty reasonable expectation, based on past performance, that the new product will be similar to existing offerings but with as-yet-unspecified improvements. If you asked people whether or not they intended to buy a phone produced by an unknown company with no track record then, indeed, they would "know nothing about it." Not the case here.

Not trying to be a total troll but... I kind of like running XP in VMware as a virtual machine (especially when it is busy grinding through critical security updates and reboot cycles - while I am getting work done on the host OS)

But don't forget, the US tax structure hides the same costs you pay in Europe in the UK at the pump for petrol. In the US we simply aren't given the choice / incentive structure to decide if we want to support a petroleum based economy... We pay for it with our federal taxes like it or not (and as a result the fed taxes imposed on the gasoline at the pump can be much lower). In the Europe/UK model it is presumably the people who use the roads who end up paying for the infrastructure since the taxes are collected at the pump.... Take a look at: http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ It looks like the D.O.T. gets $63.4B out of the $383B in non-defense spending in 2009 (16.6%) or 5.4% of the ($799B+$383B) total spending including defense.