Yes Dak. It was at one time an option. The big outlets now have the market sewn up price wise. You buy it with the O/S installed or not at all. It is now virtually impossible to buy a clean PC or one with customised specs....or to have a choice of O/S without having to pay a whole lot extra. I recently bought a pretty good spec laptop and it was cheaper to buy it from a huge retailer in a shopping mall than direct from the manufacturer. I also had to import an i7 8gig ram laptop with 1tb hard drive from USA simply because the specs I needed for music production was generally not available off the shelf in the UK....and a customised was so expensive it was cheaper to import. Even with the shipping and import duty I save a few hundred. Believe it or not I have 4 laptops and a PC tower. One is used at home and is for general purpose.
One laptop is strictly for music production and used for nothing else. Handy to have a very high spec portable. One is solely set up for gigging and used for nothing else. it is set up to work my sound and lights. I have also another duplicate the exact same as a backup in case of crashes during a gig. The tower is hooked up to my home studio and used for nothing else. You should have heard the argument with my wife explaining why I needed 5 computers.....and why they cost so much more compared to the bog standsrd £399 off the shelf laptops. LOL

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/songInfo.cfm?bandID=687727&songID=5238055