Plug and pray

Remember when plug and play was going to solve all of our driver issues ? Yeah, that was a good one, right ? What has me beat, I have a Microsoft webcam, a year or two old, not sure where the CD is, so I figure I'll ask windows to find the driver for me. It can't. Now, if I bought some dodgy Chinese made $10 camera, that would make sense to me. But if the functionality doesn't work for Microsoft hardware, how can it claim to work at all, and why does it even bother me every time I plug something in, when it's never in my life actually found and downloaded a driver for me ?