What you paid for (as part of the price of the laptop, desktop or what have you) 
is a license to use the OS in the manner specified by the licensor, MS.

XP that comes preinstalled on a computer is often called OEM software, and that carries 
a different license from a copy of XP that you'd by at a retail store (retail software). 
 MS sells licenses to OEMs for a significant price reduction in return both for the 
promise that end users will have to call the OEM (in your case, Dell) for operating 
system support and not bother MS, and for the fact that the software media is designed 
to limit the software's portability, ie, how easily it can be installed on another 
computer, and thus the limit how easily the software can be installed contrary to 
the license.  Most mfr-branded OEM copies of XP will not install on any other brand 
name of system.

Furthermore, the license to use OEM software (in this case XP) is tied to hardware 
(because that's what you have title to, the hardware you bought from Dell).  The 
OEM license does not permit that copy of XP to be used on any system that does not 
have the hardware you purchased.

The licenses for retail copies of XP are different in two major ways:  OS support 
comes from MS not any computer mfr, and the license is tied to you, so that you can 
install it on 100 computers, so long as it's installed (and activated) on one computer 
at a time.  That's why retail copies of XP are generally $100 more than OEM copies.

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