Not everybody sitting at a Windows box is a techie. Back in the day MS used to have a big warning in their technotes that advised the user to perform a registry hack, because it isn’t the safest place to play.
I’m not the only one that things this dialog/ popup is stupid, here’s from your own link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/akshayns/archive/2009/08/19/how-to-disable-internet-explorer-8-welcome-screen-for-all-users.aspx
doesn’t microsoft understand yet that users don’t read this sort of thing, they just click “next” “next” “ok” “next”
And no you actually can’t skip it by hitting the button. If you hit Ask Later it’ll come back tomorrow, and the next and the next until you either go through the stupid tour, or do the registry hack.
Again that’s what sysadmins are there for. As far as your average home user is concerned, they are very happy to get the IE8 tour after they have installed IE8, because it shows them all the new features that IE 8 has.
It was you that kept blowing hot air about the IE8 tour (which you can avoid by s simple click of the button), no?