Windows 7: best free antivirus for windows7

It's not the same

It's not the same, and basically your entire post is a red herring.

Free AV products are generally designed to try and upsell people. You get the basic product free, and the hope is that they can convert you into a paying customer. But you're getting effectively the same virus detection engine as the paying customers. In the case of AVG, you just don't get some of the more advanced scheduling options, and you're relegated to a lower priority (bandwidth wise) update server. To me, they seem like very equitable trade offs. I think Avira tends to harass people every so often with some kind of a popup, and Avast makes you register 2-3X/year for the free version. Still seems more than fair to me for people who may be on a budget.

And what about free after rebate solutions? According to your line of reasoning, those should be worthless to. Yet Fry's regularly has Kaspersky, McAfee, and Norton on free after rebate deals.

Malware is a whole other class of threat, that isn't a virus, worm, or trojan, so it really outside the realm of most AV programs. Faulting them for not picking up things that are beyond their scope of function is kind of like blaming a car for not being a spaceship.