No, it does not impact companies that might pre-install Linux, unless they perform their market research by picking random anecdotes from web forums. They lose

No, it does not impact companies that might pre-install Linux, unless they perform their market research by picking random anecdotes from web forums. They lose exactly 0% of Windows market by offering another option in Operating System (in fact, I tend to avoid hardware that only does Windows as it tends to be crap, so it might actually be a gain). If you remember people bitching about Linpus Lite because it wasn't people's favourite distro, you remember wrong.