^Every single statement you make has been addressed in previous posts yet, thus we either get on from those points or the discussion will loop in repetition without any meaningful content.
The only point I feel ther need to underline is that you're extremely naive if you think that all it takes is creating a better product than IE to have people use it instead. Case in point: the Opera browser introduced user-centered features like tabs and quick history before Firefox and was -obviously- a better browser than IE even back then, when it came in either a commercial version or a free, adware one. Same can be said for Phoenix/Firebird before it was renamed Firefox: even in beta state it was light-years ahead of IE.
And yet, it took volunteer viral marketing, a commercial partnership with Google and an ad campaign on american newspapers to get the Firefox snowball effect rolling. And that never happened with Opera, Safari or Chrome - each of which is a better browser than the IE family ones.
The point is: there's plenty of people that didn't even know they could swap out the browser and experience the net in a different way, or that thought it was a difficult or dangerous change from the default. A better product means nothing by itself. Every single browser for Windows - read, for most home and office computers in the world - except IE has the additional difficulty slope of having to be known, downloaded, installed. That's nothing for me or you, numbers show that it was a great deal for most people back at the times of Firebird and Opera 6.
Now do you really think that magically since then every single windows user has become savy in the way of software? That's all there is in forcing MS to put an option screen: make the existence of a choice known to the majority of users, make it easy to pursue their choice.
