If you’re building Windows images, you’re already doing serious stuff with Windows, and you’re probably about to deploy it to multiple workstations. Having a Windows server in this scenario makes a whole lot of sense.
End-user workstations are way different than operational hosts. The workstations themselves are not "serious" because they don't necessarily need configuration management, compliance monitoring, centralized user management, operational metrics monitoring, yadda yadda yadda. The service which builds those workstations' custom images is operationalized and does need all this. I'm not a Windows shop. There's no Windows in my datacenter. That's reason enough to use "non-native" processes for building Windows images.
