What the heck is Microsoft doing (besides shooting themselves in the foot)?!

If this is true I could see Thunderbird's usage skyrocketing...
So it appears Outlook 2007 (due out next month) s NOT going to use Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine. So what does this mean?
1. No background images - Background images in divs and table cells are gone.
2. Poor background color support - Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
3. No support for float or position - Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.
4. Shocking box model support - Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!
For those of you using Windows Live Mail, this is taste of what is to come with Outlook 2007.
Complete story