I mean, they already make awesome mice and keyboards.

Apple don't let anyone use their software on hardware that's not vetted(read: sold) by Apple. While this seems draconic, it makes sense to the extent of reducing compatibility issues.

If you don't have to worry about the environment your software will run in, you can focus on making it more user firendly or faster. You can take the time you spend on making sure you cover all the edge cases and spend it on UI. Furthermore, you can leverage the limits of your hardware and optimize for the supported range.

Plus, this way, you unify your audience's desires. It's easy to want a Mac, because there are only a few to choose from. Whether you want a Mac or not is an entirely different issue, but once you decide you want a Mac, it's fairly easy to choose. If you want a PC, you then have a thousand more choices as to what make and model and then colour and then OS and then maybe OS version. It's choice overflow, and we know it does not solve problems, rather it generates them.

This stands for mobile phones, too. It's easy to want the Apple phone: there are 4 versions, and only one is the latest. If you want a Windows Phone 7 or an Android phone -- boy do you have where to choose from. I'm not even going to talk about low-end phones. That market is a mess.

So if Microsoft did make a laptop, they could optimize their OS for the range of configurations they would offer and rebudget of time spent of compatibility to improving their users' experience. I would love that. And I think there's a whole bunch of you who would like that too.

But hey, what do I know? I want a Mac myself.