I'd rather they SELL IT WITH ONBOARD sound, 100% of the time. I hate it when there are 5 variations of the same board. You know that just increases support cost and ends up wasting money through the whole supply line.
Must cost $0.50 to add sound on the mainboard, likely $2 to add 10/100 ethernet, and $1.50 to keep video turned on in the i815 boards

But because of noisy customers ("I don't want that"

they end up having to release motherboards without these things... and combinatios of each one off and on. Which ends up impacting the price of ALL the boards

More options = more tech support = more sales staff training = more inventory = more cost.
Yes, it used to suck when you couldn't disable these things... but these days you almost always can.