Oh really? I'm using ASUS N550LF which came with Windows 8.1. Switching back to Windows 7 was a painful - some drivers (USB3.0) make it unstable.
This is wrong. There are some new laptops which refuse to accept windows 7 installations. You get freezes or hdd's not being detected or installation blocks because of new forced acpi revision, forced secure boot etc.
since all your predictions were more than accurate in the past, I'll sit back and enjoy the rest of my bottle of wine which I opened for dinner