That doesn't make a ton of sense; late-model IBM (consumer) computers were clearly designed to run Windows. While there may be people still bitter about the OS

That doesn't make a ton of sense; late-model IBM (consumer) computers were clearly designed to run Windows. While there may be people still bitter about the OS/2 thing, I think the company as a whole has moved on. I think that IBM's engineers just thought that the Windows key was dumb, something that users were unlikely to care about or miss, and not worth redesigning their keyboards for. So they didn't. Given that the keyboards on some IBM products (esp. Thinkpads) were one of their defining features, I can't blame them for not wanting to mess around with it. Personally I'm in favor of more modifier keys on keyboards, just generally; although the Windows key is lame in the sense that it's underutilized and gauche (putting the Windows logo on it), it's nice to have 3 modifiers on a keyboard in addition to shift. (Plus any hardware modifiers that you need to simulate a full 101 keys on a laptop.)