In what sense is it unfair or do they get a pass? I’m asking in earnest. My impression is that you may be confused about the dynamics or are just trying to compare Apples to Oranges out of distaste.

No one at Apple paid for a macOS license on your behalf in any sense a legal regime might recognize so there is nothing to be refunded if you choose not to accept the license. It’s one of the many, many structural advantages of vertical integration.

I see any device as hardware + software. I think, it would be better to allow other companies to compete and offer a replacement for each part.

Apple can claim "we offer vertical integration" because we make both for each other, but you should be able to buy hardware or software independently of each other.

If MS sells they own laptops with bundled windows, they will have an incentive to make adjustments so other hardware products are less competitive. Long term, we'll end up with Apple/MS monopoly on devices where you don't have a vote on how your system works and what data it sends to whom.

This means that it should be possible to install any OS on readers / phones / laptops / consoles and vote with your own money against shovelware (hello, smart TVs).

Nobody complaints that MS laptops ship with Windows - this is about hardware companies partnering with MS.

Apple doesn't pay to ship macOS on its devices.

Because they don't license it for and support it running on millions of different combinations of models, hardware, etc. MacOS can be clean only because it has such limited scope of what it has to handle compared to windows/linux

MacOS is free, what refund would you expect?

I reckon Apple buyers are more interested in the OS than in the hardware, in general.

I buy Apple products because the holistic product is the best. I say this begrudgingly, because I do not like MacOS from the user interface side.

If I could run linux on Apple hardware and get the same power-sipping performance, that's what I'd be doing.