Microsoft's approach really helped computers become ubiquitous and everyone benefitted, but IMHO that was at a slower level of advancement. Such a mass market creates inertia that is hard to change to advance the technology. Do you think 90%+ of computers would still be using BIOS if Microsoft had supported EFI or another advanced firmware years ago? They had a real chicken and egg problem.
Vertical companies like Sun, SGI, Apple and others pushed the envelope with advanced technology. It's easier for them to advance, as seen in Apple's complete phased abandonment of their old OS. That is something necessary for Microsoft, but they are wisely afraid to do it given their market.
If that's what they need to do, then we can pretty well kiss general-purpose, OS agnostic computers goodbye as a commodity. Future OS development will be pretty well limited to the commercial OS vendors who have access to the proprietary hardware specs, and hardware development will be pretty well confined to the vendors that have a relationship with those vendors.