Out of interest, how were you installing the .NET framework before?  You said "windows update or anything like that" so I'm wondering what you mean by the "anything like that" bit.  Or did you just mean "windows update"?

There is only one supported way of  redistributing the .NET framework - it has always been to ship the .NET Redistributable (as pointed out in the first reply in this thread), which has always been a single .EXE file (dotnetfx.exe) that you simply run on the target machine (using admin privileges).  So I'm wondering what it was about this that you thought was hard in comparison to Java - it doesn't get a whole lot simpler than needing just one file to be run... 

(And in my experience, the .NET installer integrates .NET a whole lot better than most JRE installers integrate Java - getting a standalone Java application to make use of your JRE often seems to need a bit of manual editing of configuration files so the application knows where to look for the Java runtime. This is never necessary in .NET. That's hardly surprising of course - one of the benefits of a single-supplier solution is that integration tends to work a lot better. This is why the iPod and iTunes tend to be easier to use than equivalent generic players with Media Player.)

Also, I'm surprised you choose to describe Windows Update as "hard" - with that you don't even need to download and run the file manually, so it's by far the easiest approach. (Short of having someone else install it for you...) Its problem is not that it's "hard" - it's simply unworkable in scenarios where you don't have reasonably good bandwidth, which is why the one-file-redistributable has always been available.