Right, I know Windows isn't free. My point is, it's the same situation with OS X, and with iMessage. Just because OS X is made by the hardwae developers doesn't change it. Windows still isn't free on Surface laptops, believe me that the OS team gets a cut of hardware sales.

Maybe it seems confusing because OS X isn't sold as a standalone product, but consider how Apple cracks down on Hackintoshes. They definitely consider it stealing.

Hackintosh isn't cracked down on. Commercial use of it is. I had an osx snow leopard partition I hackintoshed and I was trying old HDDs and it booted on my netbook. Most of the times it doesn't work is based on broken APIs or changes that aren't related to osx. 10.8 or 10.7 was the first free osx and the first one that included iMessage.