It sounds to me as if both companies are treading in “anti-competitive” waters.
Unfortunately, our legal system is slow and very expensive -
It will take time and someone with very deep pockets to challenge them.

Traditionally, when you buy something, you own it and can use it in any legal fashion you please. For example, McDonalds doesn't give a fig how you eat their hamburgers and probably wishes you would feed a few to your dog.

The controls used by Intel and MS seem to be edging a bit toward the pernicious. Maybe there are precedents for this sort of thing in technology, the TV industry or perhaps the movie industry.

What are some other examples of this sort of control?

Or the next big thing could be going back to 9″ models using ARM processors and Intel could be partially responsible for sliting their own throat with higher prices.

Intel is pretty shifty with regard to their Atom pricing: you can either get the standalone chip for $45, or the chip plus the crappy GMA950 chipset for $25. Obviously, Intel is a profit-motivated company, so they wouldn't do this for any reason but to discourage better chipsets being paired with their CPU. I'm certain that were the prices reversed, you'd see the GMA950 disappear from the face of the earth in one hardware cycle.

It's funny though – the pricing is almost just if not for the existence of better alternative chipsets – the typical Atom chipset handicaps the computer as a whole by crippling its GPU capability and I/O ports, and it literally is worth less from a utilitarian standpoint than similar systems with newer chipsets. A bit like buying an untrained packhorse vs buying a trained packhorse with cement blocks for shoes.

I'm hoping this loss of preferential pricing will help push Samsung and Lenovo to abandon all typical netbook chipsets and go for worthwhile netbooks with ATI and NVIDIA parts (or just skip to AMD and VIA systems altogether).

I didn't want a GMA950 in my future Thinkpad netbook, anyway

Via Nano, or AMD Neo or Intel CLUV could be replace Atom