(FWIW the downvote wasn’t me)
That sounds like you’re suggesting that Microsoft wouldn’t care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.
I think it’s all but certain that they’d want user’s computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.
I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren’t guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn’t theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)
And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they’re not going to cripple that as well.
“I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that." – an actual Bill Gates quote referring to the 640k quote that won’t die.
But yes, it was probably satirically ascribed to him because of MS-DOS not having the capability to deal with any more than that amount of RAM for a lot longer than it probably should have.
The “temporary” solution of requiring an extra driver to be able to do so (EMM386.SYS or similar) remained in place right up until DOS-based Windows was allowed to die.
(The underlying reason was almost certainly ancient IBM PC memory-mapped IO standards, so maybe we could ascribe the original quote an engineer working there some time around 1980.)