First, bundling the browser with the OS was absolutely the right thing to do, there's no greater indication of this than that every single modern operating system comes with a bundled web browser.
The difference you're missing is the difference between "the browser" and "a web browser". Best scenario: operating system comes with more than one, and the operating system doesn't try to force the user to default to any particular one.
What Microsoft did that was (in a sense) "evil genius" was that it managed to brainwash 85 percent of its users into thinking that "Internet Explorer" was the only way to get onto the Internet.
I was teaching a PHP primer class (primer, since it was composed mostly of non-technical people) at Hacker Dojo, and one of the students was like "what do you mean by web browser?". Seems we still have a little bit of ignorance to overcome.
The "best scenario" isn't really the best scenario. You will confuse a whole bunch of non-technical users by including more than one web browser. Then Microsoft or Apple end up having to support whatever browsers they ship so it becomes their problem as well. And it doesn't and won't happen in real life - not just Windows but Mac OS X, Ubuntu, iPhone, WebOS or Android. And there's also advantages to including a consistent rendering engine with an OS as anyone who has used Steam can tell you.
It's also interesting you say that Microsoft managed to rename the web "Internet Explorer" because in Tim Berners-Lee's book he says that after Mosaic was launched and was beginning to become popular the people behind Netscape were trying to rename the web themselves and he wasn't very happy about that.
Keep in mind that the major growth of the internet occurred after the browser war was over. Fully half of the people using the internet in the US today started to do so after IE had become the dominant browser. Personally I don't think it's too far fetched to expect that MS should have a right to put their own browser on their own OS (as with Apple, Palm, etc.) Especially so given that once one has A browser it is trivial to switch to another.
Again, I think bundling is a side note, people concentrate on it because of quirks of the law which made it a cornerstone of the anti-trust case against MS. The real reason MS won the browser war was because they pushed when Netscape was most vulnerable. The simple fact is that the change in marketshare from NS to IE during the browser war is too great to be accounted for entirely by anything that doesn't include lots and lots of active NS users consciously switching to IE. That doesn't fit the narrative of the unjustly wronged spunky little david (coughAOLcough) going up against the evil goliath, but that's the way it happened.
MS has plenty to answer for but the extended period of IE browser dominance is as much due to Netscape/AOL's massive mistakes as it is to Microsoft's cunning.
The difference you're missing is the difference between "the browser" and "a web browser". Best scenario: operating system comes with more than one, and the operating system doesn't try to force the user to default to any particular one.
What Microsoft did that was (in a sense) "evil genius" was that it managed to brainwash 85 percent of its users into thinking that "Internet Explorer" was the only way to get onto the Internet.
I was teaching a PHP primer class (primer, since it was composed mostly of non-technical people) at Hacker Dojo, and one of the students was like "what do you mean by web browser?". Seems we still have a little bit of ignorance to overcome.