Yes this thing just won't go away will it. Crippling the user experience to keep companies that are mostly a waste of space like Opera (although their mobile browsers are capable and fairly successful) in business is unacceptable.
We've seen this before, when the Java VM was unbundled from Windows it caused pain, not just to a few people but hundreds of millions who were forced to go to Sun's website and dig around and find the Java runtime - sure that was slightly different to this - but the end result is the same the user experience is reduced and millions of hours are wasted. Today we have to put up with junkware being installed along with Java - which is why it is banned from my machines.
We saw the same thing with media players. We see RealOne complain to the EU, a company which produces a horrible media player that had utterly failed in the marketplace, not because Windows comes with a media player (back then nobody used it, Winamp was probably the most popular), but because it was terrible. What do we get? The waste of space N versions of Windows - which nobody, ever has or will buy.
Operating systems should come with internet browsers, just like they should come with networking stacks and more than 2 fonts. Just like cars should come with more than 2 wheels.
The EC has showed once again they are clueless when it comes to technology. Hopefully they won't come up with too many whacky plans, like actually removing IE from Windows - too many 3rd party applications depend on it, and it brings about the interesting problem of trying to download another browser from the internet without a web browser to start with. I don't want to be ordering web browsers on CD and waiting 6-8 weeks for delivery. Thank you.