Nonsense. They could just as well sell the basic thing to everyone and provide a simple online service where you can pay for and immediately enable the features

Nonsense. They could just as well sell the basic thing to everyone and provide a simple online service where you can pay for and immediately enable the features that they decided to cripple. They don't do that because they realize that users would feel even more ripped off when they just bought an OS and are then supposed to pay again for basic features that everybody else (OSX, linux) provides for free. They probably also do that because they still phantasize about this hindering piracy anyhow. Well, who knows, sometimes luck is with the stupid...