Well, several reasons:

1. It would perperuate the myth that you can actually “own” DVD’s, cassette tapes, vinyl records, CD’s, or videotape. If we believe that we “own” stuff, we also tend to believe that we can do as we see fit with “our” property.
The RIAA/MPAA can’t have that. They want perpetual “ownership” of the content of all forms of media, everywhere. That’s why they take every opportunity to subvert (and hopefully destroy) the public domain.

2. A coupon to purchase your own DVD might mean that you’d buy some other movie. It’s obvious that the only reason they’d “pre-load” a movie is some kind of promotional gimmick. Same reason they spewed pics of Shrek all over our cereal/fruit snacks etc.
Plus, the more I think about this, the fact that they pre-loaded a movie looks like a vain attempt to look “3l33t” — “Hell yeah, they’re giving away a free movie right on the computer! They’re totally down with the new technologies!”

Yeah, sure.

It’s just a particularly stupid marketing scheme — as per usual.

i had one. turned to crap within 3 years. but it wasn’t all bad, even with winme on it. but it was much better than the pc i had previously. at least i could order with my own specs. but support was terrible.

the previous one was a compaq presario a dozen years ago - with a whopping 100mhz ram and maybe 20GB HDD. support was worse than dell. (laughing is ok. i learned to never buy a pc off the shelf again.)