So what's the point of this?

Quite so. A good few friends of mine have bought new machines on a frequent basis but economized on each one to such a degree that the things are barely capable of running Windows and lock up frequently even then (Linux is almost unthinkable, lockups at boot are not rare on such hardware). That sort of cheap and nasty hardware is going to cause more problems than it solves no matter *what* OS you're running -- yet reliable machines aren't all that much more expensive. I'm not sure who these machines are targetted at -- surely not gamers, they want their games to work at least sometimes. Probably people who want to do a bit of light web browsing and little else.