WMP is a free download for owners of a legitimate Windows installation.
WMP development is funded by the sale of Windows licenses.
Windows N versions should cost about 20-30$ less than versions with WMP, so businesses do not have to pay for functionality they do not need. And providers of other Media Players can compete on price.
Well, it's exactly because WMP development is funded by Windows that you can't assign a monetary value to removing WMP from Windows. This becomes clear once you also assign a monetary value to Windows Mail, Movie Maker, Messenger, and all other applications that were, at one time or another, bundled with the OS and funded by Windows licenses. If you did that you'd arrive at a negative price point for Windows (which would be excellent heh).
Once the EU found (right or wrong) that Microsoft was abusing its monopolist position in the OS market by bundling product aimed at another market (Media Player), the sensible course of action would be to make the N editions mandatory in the EU, not as an alternative priced the same; which is exactly what South Korea did with the K editions I believe.
On the general topic of how many and which product editions Windows 7 should have it's arguably better for both Microsoft and the consumers that there's at least two versions: one for the home and another for businesses. This product tiering has existed ever since Windows NT 3.1 shipped "alongside" Windows 3.1 in the market. It has continued to Win9x/WinNT4 and then Me/Windows2000 and finally XP Home/Professional. There are significant usage model differences between those computers used for a corporation and those used for inviduals. I do believe they have to be supersets though, like W7 will be and like XP was, otherwise you're forced to have a third-edition just for those people that need both (not to mention confuse customers because it's not trivial to know which features are missing).
So IMHO, there's not much benefit in having just one edition of Windows. Apple can do it because they don't make their profits from the OS but by bundling the OS with their high-margins hardware. Microsoft's core business IS Windows (and Office). A more apt comparison is how Apple doesn't have a single mac hardware but instead has the mini, imac, mac pro, etc. Once you accept that Windows pretty much HAS to have at least 2 versions, one could then argue if more are needed and which ones. Looking at the W7 lineup we can speculate a bit:
Since Professional is now a superset of Home (Premium) there's no artificial requirement for a third edition. Instead MS chose to have Pro miss some features. I disagree with this because there was simply no need for it. Let's assume for argument's sake that Ultimate/Enterprise has exactly the same featureset as Pro. You'll still have major corps getting a VLK version because they have to have that. So Microsoft could simply just charge more for the VLK version of Pro. Now that Pro is Business + Home Premium, there's arguably no feature Ultimate has that would appeal to individuals (in large numbers anyway - MS themselves say Ultimate is going to have limited availability).
On the other end of the spectrum MS will only license Starter for low-end hardware (read: netbooks) so again, there's no need for an arbitrary edition split because if people are running W7 on an Atom with 1gb of ram there aren't many that would be confortable using more than 3 apps with it, play games on it, etc. They could charge less not because they were taking out features but because the hardware itself would limit the use of those features.
In conclusion, I think OEM and Retail versions of Home + OEM, Retail, and VLK versions of Pro would cover all the market MS wants to target, all the while keeping the "edition number" reduced to just two. Still, they reduced them from Vista so it's an improvement.
