Windows 7: With or without IE

I was reading the Windows Blog (http://windowsteamblog.com) this morning and came across the following article: Windows 7 E Best Practices for ISV's.

Found here: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/archive/2009/07/13/windows-7-e-best-practices-for-isvs.aspx

The blog opens with the following quote from the author Yochay Kiriaty:

" we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe as in rest of the world on the worldwide launch date of 22 October, 2009. This version of Windows 7 includes Windows Internet Explorer 8 to help people get the most from their PCs and the Internet."

There is some real confusion on my part here, as the article continues to discuss about the shipments of Windows 7 "E" but I think the core point here is that there are going to workstations out there running Windows 7 and will not include IE8. Whatever they are called; Windows 7 or Windows 7 -E
As a side note, "E Versions of Windows" or more accurately "European Versions" will not contain Internet Explorer 8 or at least the IE feature will not be enable by default. From what I understand, if someone wants Internet Explorer 8 functionality that can enable the functionality through the Turn Windows On or Off dialog box, they could simply enable it through the following dialog box (I bet a reboot will be required);

There is some real confusion on my part here, as the article continues to discuss about the shipments of Windows 7 "E" but I think the core point here is that there are going to workstations out there running Windows 7 and will not include IE8. Whatever they are called; Windows 7 E, Windows 7 No-E, Windows 7 E-Less or my favourite Windows 7 -E, the real question for us application compatibility drones/workers/slaves/enthusiasts, is how should we test our applications?

It appears that there are already a few documented "No-IE" application compatibility scenarios including;

1. Hard-Coded application references to Internet Explorer will not load the default browser correctly (i.e. shellexecute is bad!)
2. Explicit references to IE8 API functions will not work
3. HTML 'Window Open' calls may fail to open a new browser window correctly

In addition, I have the following issues that may be an application compatibility issue;

1. Application help files (CHM format) rely on the web-browser control - will these work properly?
2. How will applications get/set their internet proxy settings? ChangeBase AOK could be a victim here. Ooops!
3. How about applications with embedded dependencies on a web-browser such as Sage, Reuters and Bloomberg?

I think that most applications should work OK - as always it will be the applications that broken previous rules either due to hard-coding references or bad assumptions about the target platform.
There is one benefit to all this though - most Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates relates to security updates Internet Explorer. If you don't have IE on your machine, well, the theory is you might just have a slightly easier Wednesday morning.