I think there's a case for MS to make hardware either to show what top notch PC kit looks like or a cheap minimum to stop OEMs pumping out worse than that.

MS don't need to make the consumer device everyone has they just have to force OEMs to not make piles of crap. In a way I think intel kind of own how well MS can perform with hardware. If they didn't push utlrabooks I don't know if we would have gotten anything in the pc space as well built as some apple kit.