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Manufacturers put a recovery partition on the hard drive for use when a Windows Installation fails.
They found that many users lost the disks and then expected the manufacturer to procure a recovery disk set years after the model had been discontinued. It was a system that wasn't working very well.
OEMs only done this because Microsoft forced them to. Dell were quite happy sending out Windows Reinstallation DVDs with all their systems and Dell customers were quite happy that they could readily clean install with this media. They were then not allowed to include the Reinstallation DVD with the system. To market it as an improvement they stated it was green policies not to send out discs with the system. However still send out a Dell Drivers DVD for some time which of course was useless without the OS Reinstallation DVD. There are far more customers complaining that they did not get proper installation media with their system than customers complaining they got too many discs and that it wasn't "green" especially on the home consumer market.
A UK PC chain company who tried to help their customers got sued by Microsoft so it is Microsoft who are making life difficult and not the OEMs:
"We note that proceedings have been issued by Microsoft Corporation against Comet relating to the creation of recovery discs by Comet on behalf of its customers.
"Comet has sought and received legal advice from leading counsel to support its view that the production of recovery discs did not infringe Microsoft’s intellectual property.
"Comet firmly believes that it acted in the very best interests of its customers. It believes its customers had been adversely affected by the decision to stop supplying recovery discs with each new Microsoft Operating System based computer. Accordingly Comet is satisfied that it has a good defence to the claim and will defend its position vigorously."
"The discs were sold alongside new PCs. Each set of recovery discs were specific to the customer’s new laptop and were sent after purchase directly to each customer."
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/4/2681319/microsoft-comet-counterfeit-windows-lawsuit
The current recovery method is even more inadequate as when the hard drive goes so does the OS recovery media. Also the programs to create recovery media often create faulty media.
Finally the install includes bloatware which limits system performance. This can be significantly worse when a Service Pack is released.
With Vista/7 we referred many customers to Digital River but Microsoft provided no installation media on Digital River for Windows 8. They also had the worst deployment of a Service Pack that I have seen with Windows 8.1.