How is it that...

I just tried to make my kids' computer usable by one, M. Wife.

She needed primopdf, so I installed it for her. Then it didn't work. Nothing would print, no errors, nothing.
After playing with it a bit, taking the "push all the buttons" approach, I finally managed to get an actual error message in place of the nothingness:
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135)

Copy/paste in Google. Voila. It shows up a zillion times in almost any app you can think of, and the explanation - the dot-Net framework is missing. OK, so now I'm downloading the thing, and we'll be back up and running in no time. I guess my kids never needed the .Net framework.

Now I gotta ask a series of how is it questions :
1) How is it that M$ expects the .Net framework to be so mighty popular, and they still haven't implemented a decent error message of "please install the .Net framework" if it's not found ?
2) How is it that MS themselves did not use the .Net framework for Office 2007 ? (I have office on this machine, and it worked without it). Not good enough for them ?
3) How is it that when I write "download .Net framework" in any search engine including Bing, I get v2.0 as the first result, whereas v3.5 only comes second, and v3.5sp1, which is the newest one may or may not show up depending on which search engine I use?

So many stupid questions, so little time...