[arp242]

All true, but I also think it's kind of missing the point of the article a bit: which isn't that a Microsoft account is bad in itself, or even a bad default, but rather that they go out of their way to make it as hard as possible for you to opt-out of a Microsoft account as you need to play all sort of non-obvious tricks to do so. They could just have some small text with "no thanks" and a popup "you'll miss out on sync, backup, etc. are you sure?"

The objections are more abstract, as in "it's my bloody computer, allow me to do what I bloody want!" Well... Microsoft says no apparently.