M$ are just being bloody clever here. Just like in their recent court dealings, when they offered to "give away" $millions worth of PC's and software to schools (which was accepted until Apple and others pointed out that it gave M$ an unfair advantage as it would bias the kids against anything other than M$). What their doing here is simply bug (read: FLAW) hunting on a huge scale. After all tomorrows HaKeRz 'n CrAkErZ are todays students, so it makes perfect sense to get them to do all the hard work of flushing out all the many problems that M$ 'build-in' to their products.
-john
