This problem isn't limited to Windows 7/2008 or XP. It affects Win10 too.
>especially when the font is merely ugly in a cosmetic sense, and not unreadable
Eh, you won't go very far with this attitude in any design team.
Also, anyone who tried to manually craft font-family fallback path are already making effort. You can literally choose to not assign any font. Actually, it probably works better: most of browsers have sensible default (which often times is system font) already.
>especially when the font is merely ugly in a cosmetic sense, and not unreadable
Eh, you won't go very far with this attitude in any design team.
Also, anyone who tried to manually craft font-family fallback path are already making effort. You can literally choose to not assign any font. Actually, it probably works better: most of browsers have sensible default (which often times is system font) already.