With respect, I think a lot of people are missing a few issueshere.
I would always expect MS to give anyone who knows what they are doing an option to disable this - if not then, yes, MS has got it wrong.

But on a PC sold in a high street store (especially 3-5 years ago) ??
A lot of this depends on how old you are - let's take an arbitrary age of say, 35 years old.
If you are over 35 (or whatever), then you expect your PC to work like any other household appliance. We all know that this isn't the case at the moment.

I'm speaking from personal experience here, as I have fixed several PCs over the last year for friends & family (I happen to be in the 35+ age range, but have worked in the IT industry since university). One quote that I thought summed everything up was:

"I expected this to work like my lawnmower - why doesn't it do what is says on the box?"

To which I replied that this was a bad analogy, and in fact your PC was more like a dodgy second hand car, which needed a mechanic to fix it (it was infected with bugbear at the time). As I've done that, why don't you let me give you some driving lessons