I've done that with hardware that got installed in a factory. Why not? You pay a one-time, small license fee, you get years of free support from a major compa

I've done that with hardware that got installed in a factory. Why not? You pay a one-time, small license fee, you get years of free support from a major company, I don't have to document all the details of my stripped down kernel and how to recreate it, you can hire anybody off the street to work on it long after I am gone (and I am long gone from that company, but the hardware lives on), they didn't have to pay me to build out a unique OS, the low power computer we had could more than handle XP, there was (and continues to be) continued new, unknown requirements and upgrades, the people required to occasionally touch the interface had more PC experience than for any embedded or linux OS, and on and on. Why wouldn't I slap a copy of XP on there? Well, this story is the counter-argument, of course. I still think it was the right decision.