[georgemcbay]

Your last paragraph is just totally wrong. Ever since MS has been selling Windows online, they've also been providing a tool which will put the ISO onto bootable DVD or USB (your choice).

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help...

They point to this tool pretty clearly as part of the purchase process.

So with MS you can do it anyway you like: Installation as an app, or an ISO which you may trivially burn to a DVD or flash to a USB drive using a tool that they also provide.

[uxp]

FWIW, Apple also ships a tool inside the Lion and Mountain Lion installations that does the same thing, writes a bootable disk from the recovery partition onto a USB flash drive. It's found at "/Applications/Utilities/Recovery Disk Assistant.app"