Attention xbox360 fans! The 360 runs AIX
How many operating systems are most of the people here even aware of other than windows? OS X, Linux, and maybe BSD. And yet people feel they have enough information to make such strong statements.
I would wager that if you took a survey of OS researchers very few of them would suggest vista as "the best" (whatever that means). I would even go so far as to suggest that this would apply to people at MS research (although your survey would have to be by secret ballot). Windows will always be limited by the need to remain backwards compatible and the need to support weird hardware combinations (although linux has it worse). And that's if Microsoft one day stopped being a mediocre company.
Here are some examples which eschew the identity politics that inevitably cloud any discussion when apple is mentioned.
Without rampant piracy (tacitly supported by MS) and their horizontal monopoly they wouldn't have beaten Dr. DOS. And without people just being comfortable with it and the legacy apps they never would have defeated the technically superior OS/2 or BeOS.
