To pile on wlesieutre's point, it's a separate app but should be part of every user install IMHO.
Keyboard manager for instance is plenty powerful while keeping a very simple interface, and will paliate the need for AutoHotKey for most people.
There's a flurry of other stuff that I guess Microsoft employees felt are tremendously helpful but couldn't convince management to bake into the system.
Being baked in or not is a tradeoff. In this case I'd say it would better if it was in, but having a one time download from a trusted source isn't the end of the world either.
I'd make the parallel with browsers: there's an argument for them to stay decoupled from the system.
I suspect being an optionally installable tool for power users gives their team more flexibility to make it a good product in an attempt to keep those users on Windows, if it had big user numbers they’d have to turn it into PowerToys 365 Copilot and make it so opening anything with the launcher tool somehow involved a round-trip through Edge and Bing
I'm sorry, but are you saying pressing the space bar is a power user move? Really? MS cannot include it, as that'd be admitting someone else came up with a better move. Having it as an installable option just says, yeah, it's cool, but only for those worthy. WTF? They just as easily could have had it be ctrl+windows+spacebar, and then it would be just a natural windows user shortcut. Maybe throw in +alt so that it's just smash all four bottom buttons in an angry move. even Apple didn't require it to be OpenApple+spacebar or ClosedApple+spacebar. It's just spacebar right out of the box. No secondary installs or buttons required.