It turns out Steve Ball had posted a few comments I had missed in my previous post. (In my defence, I read something like 100 comments before I posted)

First of all, Steve writes:

[...]
Finally, please remember that this conversation was paraphrased from a 20 minute phone call.
[...]
Obviously, many have a deep passion about this issue, and we’re continuing to listen to your feedback and comments.

Good to know they’re listening (seriously) - I just hope they take some action to let people disable this.

And then Steve puts up another comment linking to a post by Joe Wilcox:

FYI, some useful comments from Joe Wilcox:

http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/016933.html

“Assuming Microsoft execs are thinking like marketers, the startup sound should be more than just part of the operating system. It should be part of the marketing of the operating system. If Microsoft takes that approach, I would recommend keeping the sound permanently turned on and unchangeable without customization, at least in the early days.”

This is exactly the thinking behind this decision from the Marketing team. Thanks for good observations, Joe.

I’m stunned.

Obviously if the Marketing folks think this is a great idea - who are we to object?

Lets think that thought by Joe through a little more though — Keep “the sound permanently turned on and unchangeable without customization, at least in the early days.”

This looks — well.. okay-ish, at first glance. Maybe.

What about the people who’s entire working day is filled with installing/fixing Windows PCs? They’re going to be driven absolutely bonkers if they’ve got a machine which has some weird problem that requires they restart every few minutes (a bunch of driver installs, for example?)

What about using your laptop in a library, or classroom? You’d have to remember every time to plug in a pair of headphones, lest you risk the wrath of others.

Others keep saying that Mac has had this sound since they first had sound capability — sure, they have. Someone even mentioned that Ubuntu (or some other linux distro) has also had this for a while.

They’re forgetting one thing - in both cases, this can be disabled (and not by plugging in a pair of headphones). In the Mac case - you can hold some sort of key-combo if you want to disable it for one boot, or some sort of downloadable utility which will disable it permanently.
For ubuntu - you can just rip the sound out, or edit some config file.

Go for it, Microsoft. Install a default sound - we know you will anyway - and make it a great brand-experience (which only matters to Marketing people, the rest of us couldn’t give a damn). Just give us the option (like we have right now) to disable it without removing sound hardware.