Paying the Price of Windows

I've written variously about the implications of the arrival of the ultraportable sector (at greatest length here), notably that as the price of systems fall, so the chasm between Windows and GNU/Linux pricing deepens - at least relatively (can you have a relative chasm?). Against that background, this is interesting:

However, our source told us that there would be two new SKUs, the Eee PC 900 Win and Eee PC 900, with the former featuring Windows XP pre-installed, 1GB RAM and a 12GB SSD for just £329 inc. VAT. More intriguing, though, was the latter new Linux edition, which we were told would house 20GB of storage and retail for the same price as the XP version.

See what they've done? Rather selling the GNU/Linux version for less than the one running Windows XP, Asus has upped the spec for the former, and kept the price the same. That doesn't seem very logical: after all, GNU/Linux actually needs *less* memory than XP, so it would have been more sensible to keep the memory the same, and cut the price.

The cynic in me can't help feeling that Asus has been leant on here by Microsoft, and "persuaded" not to sell the GNU/Linux system for less than that of Windows XP. The assumption being that most users won't care about the difference in RAM, and will just go ahead and stick with familiar old XP when given the choice between what seem to be similar systems.