Aliasalpha: The bloat with windows comes from giving you absolutely everything in large packages. A mate of mine was tooling around with xp a while back and managed to get the install down to something like 230mb by stripping out everything that wasn't essential. He pulled out old drivers, programs and even pulled the system critical DLLs apart and removed pointless icons he was never going to use
Removing such components can and will cause problems later on, especially when installing service packs. If you want to rebuild your installation media and reinstall all your software every time a new service pack comes out, sure, go for it, but it's strongly discouraged. Unless you are using a netbook or a really outdated system, the space Windows takes up is an insigificant fraction of the hard drive.
Aliasalpha: What I'd like to see is an old school minimum/default/maximum install option. The maximum does absolutely everything & to hell with the drivespace, the default would be a balance and minimal would install no drivers other than those for items connected at install, install no sample videos, no annoying windows sounds or games and none of the flashy "hey you've just installed windows!!" intros.
This is a really bad idea for several reasons. The space taken up by sound effects and other content is laughably small, and removing drivers would greatly cripple the "plug and play" functionality and wide hardware support Windows is known for. With a normal Windows install you can plug in any device in existence and there's a good chance that Windows includes an official driver for it or can fall back on a partially-functional, generic driver. Some devices simply don't work correctly with generic drivers. Having the non-generic drivers missing from the Windows install would mean Windows would have to ask for the CD or internet access (for a Windows Update driver search) in order to do anything with that device. If such a hypothetical feature were available, some computer manufacturers might ship OEM systems installed that way to cheat on the free space available (especially on netbooks), and people would then blame Microsoft when the system couldn't detect hardly anything right out of the box without a CD or internet connection.
With the average computer shipping with a hard drive anywhere from 160-320+ GB, Windows 7 taking up about 10-15 GB isn't at all unreasonable. For comparison, GTA IV takes up 18 GB (no, that's not a typo), a reflection of the average size of games in the near future. Every version of Windows is inevitably larger, but hard drive sizes are growing at a much faster pace.