“On the new online Microsoft Store, we’ve added a bunch of new products, including Windows 7 PCs as well as select 3rd party software and accessories,” Trevin Chow, senior lead program manager for Microsoft Store, said in a blog post announcing the move. “And let’s not forget a ton of gaming products that have been added including a bunch of the top selling Xbox 360 titles.”

Interesting. Not exactly sure what the upside is to selling PCs online when you don’t make them. It’s not like Microsoft (MSFT) will be offering a better experience than, say, Best Buy (BBY), HP (HPQ) or Dell (DELL). And an online outlet doesn’t afford the company the same opportunity to cultivate the “Microsoft Experience” it’s clearly going for in its brick-and-mortar outlets. So why bother?

A unified experience online and off, I suppose. And, if the infrastructure is in place to sell through one channel, why not sell through both? Of course, the downside is that if you don’t execute well, you risk giving customers another lousy experience with which to associate your products.

In remarks at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference today, COO Kevin Turner said Microsoft has settled on a location for the retail stores it announced earlier this year: Within spitting distance of Apple stores. “We will have some retail stores that are opened up right next door to Apple stores this fall,” he said.

There goes the neighborhood, right? Anyway…

So Microsoft is going to play McDonald’s (MCD) to Apple’s Burger King (BKC). Makes sense. Apple’s retail locations are very well chosen. Microsoft, if it’s going to go this route, would be wise to have stores there as well. As economic theorists Charles ReVelle and Harold Hotelling once observed, “The best position for a new vendor is back-to-back with the well-positioned first vendor, allowing an even split of the market. Any other position of the new vendor would have given that new entrant a smaller market share.”

And one could argue that Redmond might benefit from a retail presence that brings all its wares together in a single “shopping experience”–Windows, Xbox, Zune. All that partner hardware. Surface. Put a Project Natal booth at the back of the store to draw foot traffic and who knows what might happen?

Although, I’m not quite certain why anyone would, given the prices.

The Microsoft Store charges $319.95 for Windows Vista Ultimate, an OS you can purchase from Amazon (AMZN) for $249.99. It charges $149.95 for Microsoft Office. You can find that at Amazon for substantially less, as well–$92.50. On Amazon, a full version of Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with SP2 will set you back $179.99. At the Microsoft Store it will…well, actually, it seems you can’t buy it at the Microsoft Store. Go figure.

But if you could, you’d almost certainly pay a premium for it. So, really, why bother?

And beyond that, why bother to launch an overpriced online software store in the middle of a nasty recession?