Having said that, Micro$oft and modern CS theory deserve a lion's share of the blame for bloat: Why do today's PC's, which are 8,000+ times more powerful than home computers of the 1980's, actually take longer to boot? My ancient Apple IIe, sporting a 1Mhz 8-bit 65C02 CPU, kicks the snot out of my 1.8Ghz Althlon when it comes to simple, practical tasks like booting to a usable state, or even loading a Word Processor. All the bells, whistles and (as you mentioned) spyware are killing PCs, and we expect far too little from them considering the (useful) processing potential.
Go into the Registry, search for "RunOnce", and then navigate to the key right above it ("Run"), and you'll get some idea of what gets loaded when you start up. Anything over 5 or 6 items is deadwood, eating cycles and bandwidth, and compromising your privacy.
I do all that. I spend hours trying to get this junk off my computer that I did not put on there. I have several software programs that are supposed to prevent it from getting on, and others that are supposed to take it off. Still, the stuff gets on, and causes my computer to freeze up in some awkward circumstance. I will take some of these programs off my computer, and then 20 minutes later, they are on it again. They ought to at least pass a law requiring that companies not load these products onto any computer more than once. If I take it off, then they should not be putting it back on.
The guys in Washington are too busy dealing with stuff that doesn't matter, or is not their job, to deal with the important stuff.