If the reality of the "standardized PC" were aligned with the rhetoric, no PC would ship with a separate driver disc. Windows XP would install onto a blank hard drive in the time it takes to copy the files. There would be no Found New Hardware Wizard, and if you inherited a PC with no discs or documentation, you could be certain that a store-bought Windows Vista DVD would be the only thing you'd need to make it work.

That's the reality for every modern-era Mac. A used Mac, plus nothing but a generic copy of Leopard, is a working computer. On that Mac's first connection to the Internet, all of that specific model's latest device drivers and firmware are downloaded and installed in one hands-off operation. Surely, if someone were given a chance to to lay out the requirements for a PC standard from scratch, this sort of simplicity would be among them.

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Desktop, PC, Mac, AMD