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Welcome to the world of big business computing.
Most big computer manufacturers don't get individual Windows CD's to ship with their product.
What they do get is a single special CD from Microsoft, and a shit load of license keys. They can make copies of the Cd if they want to, but are not required to if they provide a means of recovery. So what they do is install the OS once to a machine with a specific hardware configuration, then image it to all the other machines of the same configuration.
The reason places like Dell and Gateway don't do this, is because you can customize your machine so they would have to make hundreds of these images to satisfy each combination of hardware, that's just not practical. Do these places have someone sitting at each machine running the Windows install from the CD, no. The create a base machine. Then they run a utility called sysprep and then image that machine.
Sysprep rips out all the hardware info and forces the machine to go through a mini setup the next time it is rebooted. This setup detects all the hardware and installs the appropriate drivers. HP doesn't do this, because they don't allow you to customize your system.
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