If Microsoft is prevented from bundling Office, for example, consumers may be allowed to choose from a variety of office suites, all of them suddenly on a more competitive field. Those products will very likely bring the new innovations that have truly been missing from Microsoft's products over the past decade. Those companies will likely be able to reap the benefits of producing the innovation, hire more staff and create more innovations. Look at Internet Explorer. Microsoft copied and Netscape's plans and ideas and did in fact add their own touches to the their product while the development of Navigator was in full swing.
Navigator is now officially dead.
The base platform that most customers want includes a personal computer, an operating system and a set of basic productivity applications that can be used to accomplish important tasks. Compaq provides such a solution to customers by integrating the PC with the operating system and the associated hardware peripherals and software applications. The fact that the operating system and certain key applications have been developed and tested by a single company to work seamlessly together generally makes the software more reliable, better performing, and less costly for OEMs to deploy and support, all benefits that flow to the OEM's customers. Computers running Microsoft technology are so widely known for dismal software quality that it practically makes the rest of your points here mute. The part that is really misleading is the next sentence where you go on to state that consumers don't want to assemble their own components.