I am no fan of Microsoft's monopoly tactics.

Frequently Microsoft's actions hurt consumers and stifle innovation.

That annoys me, especially when they spend time & resources into making products harder to inter operate with each other, when compatibility would have otherwise been much more trivial (think IE, Office, Windows, ...). I hate when MS resorts to these "embrace and extend" tactics, going out of it's way to harm competitors.

However, there is a point when forcing MS to do its competitors' work is unreasonable.

"These remedies are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers."

Replace 'desktop search providers' with any of the following subsystems:

file systems

windows managers

network stacks

MS has competitors on all fronts, should they be allowed to force MS to change the core OS for their benefit?

I would love for MS to embrace the competition and endorse a large scale improvement effort to benefit their own customers, however if it were any other company these kinds of requests would be seen as totally unreasonable.

As far as defining what belongs in the core os, I think that it is an arbitrary line. The OS should be functional out of the box, and a search function is very useful.