What a stupid article!
Any hacker that can get into your computer now can see what you have installed.
With both iOS and Windows, updates are performed based on installed applications —— meaning, the information is already accessable to the companies!
That goes without saying. This article, however, is making the claim that the ability to see your system(s) is now automatic, and they don't even have to hack in. Your own system is spying on you--and you agreed to it with the install.
I like my system. No one knows what's on it except for me.
In iOS, that's because of the completely closed mechanism in which apps can be obtained. The App Store has a record of everything you've ever bought, but I think it's still up to your device to check which currently installed apps (a subset of the universe of all apps ever bought) have updates, rather than update notifications being pushed down to your device. (Honestly, I don't know whether it is push or fetch, but fetch makes more sense to me.)
However, in comparison, Mac OS X has its App Store as well, but that's not the sole source of applications for the Mac -- the Mac doesn't "phone home" to Apple to tell it about apps you've installed outside of their App Store. Compare also to Fedora Linux and similar RPM-based package managers. I can install any RPM package I like, and the update utility knows where to go to check for updates to my installed packages; there isn't some "Fedora database" that lists my installed apps anywhere, I get the update information via fetch.
So, to that end, I see no reason for Windows 8 (or any other operating system) to need to "report" a list of all installed apps back to the OS manufacturer. Providing such information optionally and voluntarily to diagnose system issues makes sense, but having it enabled by default, and in the absence of ongoing operational issue, is not a good privacy practice.