Audacity is open source and free and it works with any hardware/drivers that work with Windows, so it doesn't matter if it's included or not. And by the time the consumer receives the CD, there is a often new version available for download.
Doe's anyone have recommendations on turntables? I'm looking for something under $200.
See
Knowzy.com for lots of turntable information & recommendations.
The most important thing is to
avoid ceramic cartridges.
USB turntables are "ready to go", and virtually all of them have line-level outputs in case you want to plug it into your stereo. With a "traditional" hi-fi turntable, you'd have to add a cartridge, preamp, and USB interface.
If you have a desktop/tower computer with a regular soundcard you can plug the preamp into the soundcard's line inputs and you don't need the USB interface. And/or you can buy a USB interface with the phono preamp built-in. Or if you have an older stereo receiver with a phono input, it has a phono preamp built-in and you can connect the tape-outputs to line-in on your soundcard.
I have win7 and am wondering if this a big hassle. How easy is it to use the software?
It's not hard after you get it set up and learn to use it. 
Some people seem to have trouble selecting the USB turntable as the
recording device and you'll have to learn how to make separate files for each song. And if you want MP3, you have to install the optional LAME MP3 encoder. (Knowzy doesn't seem to like Audacity.) But, you'll have to learn those things with any software. There are several
helpful tutorials in the Audacity Manual and you can help here on the forum.
Does the Audacity software let me reduce crackles and pops on the records? Basically reducing noise without losing music quality.
Audacity and other software can help... You can definitely make some improvement but almost anything you do has the potential for introducing artifacts (side-effects)
so if you want the best quality buy the CDs or MP3s. (MP3 is lossy compression but with high-quality settings the compression artifacts are usually inaudible and never as bad as analog vinyl.*
Audacity has 3 "effects" for noise reduction -
Noise Reduction (for reducing constant background hum & hiss).
Click Removal (for automatically reducing loud clicks)
Repair (for removing clicks & pops that you find & select manually)
This Page has links to specialized vinyl clean-up software and tons of other information abut digitizing vinyl.
Click Repair and
Wave Corrector are popular and affordable automatic de-clickers.
Wave Repair is a manual de-clicker that only touches the audio where you identify a defect, and it does an audibly perfect job on most clicks & pops.
I've used Wave Repair for many years, but since it's manual it usually takes me a full-weekend to fix-up a digitized LP. It wouldn't be practical for 100 albums all at once. I recently purchased Wave Corrector and I'm currently using both programs on a particularly bad LP I've been working on for a few weekends (but not really the full-weekends).
* Some people like the sound of vinyl and that's a matter of personal taste, but
technically (noise, distortion, frequency response) it's inferior to digital.