I swear to God. It was an Eee PC or whatever. I bought this around 08-09. The D drive was with like 20-30GB of empty space. The C drive had way less than 1GB free. Needless to say, the computer stopped functioning within days, after the first windows update.
... "This reached absurd levels when I bought a netbook that had a full C drive right from the purchase"
Sorry what? I bough a netbook a year and a half ago, and it had a 250GB HD then, are you sure you're not looking at the recovery partition?
Some of the points stand, but they're hardly consistent across all "Windows" laptops (whatever that is...).