Re: oh lord...
This may be something that is also intended to help non-first world Internet connection countries or regions. Just considering these situations there are a lot of instances where there will be quite a few locally networked PCs but with rather limited bandwidth - far better that the systems are patched and updated than not. Or another easy example in the first-world Internet sceneria on a HE campus of some form there will be thousands of non-domain controlled PCs downloading thousands of updates which eats a lot of bandwidth.
This is actually rather a good idea from Microsoft (as long as it's done properly, but that's true for anything really).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
