I don't think they removed anything other than iexplore.exe, which is a very simple shell application any programmer can quickly knock together in Visual Studio

I don't think they removed anything other than iexplore.exe, which is a very simple shell application any programmer can quickly knock together in Visual Studio in one day. This shell uses COM objects integrated with the OS so tightly that nobody can every remove them. But who cares, it's the fact that users will have a choice of browsers that matters.