There is a reason why it is not offered as an option to be preinstalled on laptops except in a few instances.
That reason is not "because it is bad".
The windows license is a tax on laptops. End of story. I have a dell xps 13 and even I paid it (dell's developer edition laptop is often hard to acquire for some reason).
I think it quite literally is, or at least that's a part of it (I won't say Microsoft strong-arming has zero effect). Linux would be an exceedingly poor experience for most customers—worse even than Windows with all the preinstalled crapware some manufacturers add.
The first netbooks ran Linux. The choice seemed to make sense. Cost was paramount, and manufacturers needed something exceedingly lightweight.
But I remember reviews from the time explicitly recommending that people ignore any netbooks that don't come with Windows. It didn't take very long before they almost all switched over to XP.