A friend of mine had a VAIO a few years back and we found a really simple way to avoid the restore CDs adding all of that crap while still getting the drivers installed. We just installed Linux on it.

The stuff that they install is awful. And I'm not talking about awful in a nice way. She had to buy extra RAM just to run Windows, not because Windows couldn't handle the amount of memory but because one of those bundled resident programs leaked memory. (We're talking about a couple of hours between reboots here.)

I'm not going to claim that Apple is an angel here though. They install a bunch of demoware themselves. But at least you can reinstall the OS to get rid of it (provided that you know what you're doing).