why?

Those particular circumstances cause one to be 'up a creek without a paddle'. Or SOL, whichever you prefer.

For the price of the darn things, and the beating that some of them take, CD/DVD's need to be part of the package. The darn things don't cost that much.

edit - that which I am known for

This isn't unique to laptops; tablets and consumer-grade desktop systems also have recovery partitions.

Every system I've seen with a recovery partition also has a utility to build recovery CDs. The manufacturer will also send them to you and charge only for the shipping fees. If hard drive longevity is a serious concern, either of these tools will provide some insurance provided you avail yourself of them BEFORE the hard drive has problems.

My experience is there's one thing less reliable than laptop hard drives, and that's users' ability to remember where they put the recover CDs (if they didn't throw them away). In those cases the recovery partition is well worth the minimal amount of space it uses.

Which is why I always load a fresh copy of windows for any laptop I might aquire. Most of the time that factory partition for the recovery is waaaaaay larger than neccessary as well. I just worked on a customer's Latitude and the factory recovery partition was close to 10 gigs.

I just bought a laptop, and it was set up the same way, except, they expect you to make your own recovery CDs. Unfortunately, I made the CDs... All 9 of them. Why? Because I didn't have a burnable DVD handy. So, they could spend the extra couple of bucks and include them, or they can make you, the customer do it. From their standpoint, they were smart to make the customer do it.

profit.

It costs more to send recovery CD's than it does to have the user burn them. Then when you fail to burn the CD's the manufacturer can charge you for them. It is also much easier to get a customer to reinstall the OS in the event of failure of the OS.

On a more Machiavellian note, it could be a way to stop you from making the company reimburse you for the preinstalled MS OS because you have to boot the CD to burn the recovery disks.

I always thought this was a means of preventing piracy of windows discs.

Generally OEM discs for specific manufacturers like a Dell pass the validation checks on windows update and download sites without question on any computer they are installed on. So they would be popular to copy and share for free windows provided you only share with friend you know wouldnt get the product key barred by microsoft.

The only problem is getting around activation which is simply done using a tool that modifies winlogon.exe so it doesnt perform the activation check.

Even though some systems let you burn a disc or pay for postage of a disc, maybe that is enough to make people a little more protective of their licence and less likely to share it around.