Even the very high end gamers played HL2 and contributed to that survey I'm sure. The people playing Supreme Commander, Bioshock, whatever, are probably on that list, at least to an extent.

 What the hell does your Linux rhetoric have anything to do with this thread.  I respect that you like Linux, and I use it often as well, but keep it in its own thread.

And what are you talking about viruses and crashing, and slowing to a crawl after a month.  If that happened to your new Vista machine, then you are a complete idiot, and you must be absolutely computer illiterate (like the one who clicks on the " VIRUS DETECTED CLICK HERE FOR FREE SCAN" advertisement type stupid).  Cut the crap.  Seriously.  I've had this Vista machine since May, and it's been running absolutely fine.  A machines reliability depends on its user.

valve's numbers arent completely accurate as i doubt that all 9+ million WoW users were apart of that survey.

Valve's numbers are completely accurate for all gamers that have Steam and opted to participate in this survey. That's all. That is a substantial amount of gamers anyway.

You have to have a decent PC to play WoW too, at least at an enjoyable level.

 I played WoW on a 1.8ghz P4, 512 mb of RAM and a Raedon 9250 at a very acceptable level of performance.  Blizzard, just like Valve, is a great company in recognizing that most PC users do not have 1337 system setups.  Both make games that can run on a wide array of systems.  I don't understand why more PC gaming companies don't  take this to heart as well.  I mean, the more graphically advanced you make a game, the more potential customers you exclude from potential sales.  It doesn't make much sense to me. 

You're right, Blizzard is another one of those companies.  I forgot about them.

What I really like about Valve is that they don't leave the high-end users "high and dry" so to speak.  They give players a wide range of options.  You can play without HDR lighting, without dynamic shadows, without high quality reflections, without all that stuff on your low-end system, and it will still look good and run at a high framerate.  Or if you have that SLI setup, you can crank everything up until your eyes bleed.  It takes a lot these days to convince me to upgrade my PC.  I'm glad I can enjoy TF2 without having to do so, but I'm also glad that when I eventually do upgrade, TF2 will look even better. 

While Blizzard also embraces the fact that most people don't have cutting edge PC's, I do agree with you...

in that Valve's games offer a wider range of graphical options.  Most blizzard games don't acommadate the high end machines like Valve's do.  WoW, technically, looks like crap, even if you have a high end system.  Now I'll argue till I die about how much I love the style of Warcraft 3 and WoW, and how nice it is to be able to play WC3 on an 8 year old computer when I actually need to when I have 4 friends over for LAN, but they don't really offer much on the other side of the spectrum for people who have high end computers and want to take advantage of it.  Of course Blizzard games are so damn good, and they do a very clever job of hiding their lack of polygons behind a very stylized look, that no one cares that their games aren't cutting edge.