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Bottom line, Fortune 1000 or even small businesses don't go and buy parts, so they can assemble and build their servers themselves.

You are half right. Most large companies do indeed build their own servers, because that way they can get exactly what they want.

Granted, all the parts come from big name suppliers and they don't tend to fiddle with lots and lots of different parts, but they do tend to buy something like this:

One mostly bare Dell Powerdedge server from Dell
4 GB RAM from Crucial
Two 120GB drives from DrivesDirect.
Two network cards from Intel.

The box arrives, the hard drive is pulled out and discarded, the new drives, RAM and NICs are installed, and an OS is installed.

Then it goes into the rack. One NIC is used for normal network communication, one NIC is used for the management network and one is kept for a hot spare.

I've built file servers, print servers, firewalls, LDAP servers, Kerberos servers and various specialty boxes in just this method while working for more than one Fortune 500 company and half a dozen Fortune 1000 companies.

Companies without an IT department generally take what Dell or HP gives them. Those companies are generally a lot smaller and buy complete support contracts for software and hardware.

"Most large companies do indeed build their own servers, because that way they can get exactly what they want"

Dell can get you exactly what you want, to the exact specifications.
They have wbhole department set up just for that.
Lots of firms have had Dell deliver their desktop and server computers and even had Dell finish the installation itself, on site, in record time.
I remember reading a story in either Businessweek or Fortune about Dell doing deals of that nature a few years back.

Having read the back-and-forth between you two on the costs of open source software may I suggest that everyone could benefit from looking at the opinion of Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass. when they compared the costs of Linux with Windows last year. Their full article is not available unless you register, but here is an abstract posted on info-edge.com of the gist of the findings:

Abstract: Open source, including Linux, is being deployed by a majority of companies in 2004, yet we question whether customers are adequately prepared to deal with the costs and risks of managing these environments. The allure of free software is accelerating the deployment of open source platforms, but open source is not free and may actually increase financial and business risk.

Discussions with five companies that tracked their total costs indicated Linux was between 5% and 20% more expensive than Windows. There were two distinct situations where Linux was the clear cost winner: Unix migrations and Linux-only deployments. Linux, and other open source software can provide big benefits to the organization, however, companies need to know what to expect, and plan appropriately to mitigate these concerns.

Forrester Research is a non-affiliated research group that Forbes has rated as among the top 200 small companies in America.