You sound almost as bad as the Customer at the coffee shop that went running to the manager because I was not running windows on the laptop, and I was going to "hack" into the internet with Linux.. 
The customer stopped the manager when he was walking around, and asked why he wasn't worried about me getting on the net and if he was going to stop me.. The Manager looked at him and said " NO It's FREE access" What did you think he was doing Cracking my server?" 
Actually, I've been banned from a coffee shop for almost the same circumstances! I had a shell open to my server at home to check on some things and the manager of the shop came over and told me I was hacking and had to leave when I was doing what to me is akin reading one's email. Of course this was after a time a few months earlier at the same place where I was running airpwn just to see if anyone would notice, apparently goatse was not a pro image choice because the same manager came over and "politely" requested that I stop and leave.
Happened at an Apple store once too, I was using one of the display macbooks to check on the same server and one of their "geeks" powered off the machine and told me to leave because "only hackers use the terminal application." I JUST WANTED TO CHECK MY LOGFILES GEEZE! (btw, postcount doesn't matter to me, I just smell a straw man here, that's why the long posts)
Plekto, I had a nice big wall of text all typed and ready to rebutt you but in the end I doubt I can convince you otherwise on your views. However, I will note that I have a 6 year-old athlon xp machine that runs windows 7 home premium more than adequately with all the bells and whistles, and I survived over a year of Vista on it too. My work machine also cost about $500 to build and runs 7 business, I use this machine for designing analog IC layouts with a CAD package that actually has a Linux port, however the port is 32bit, and runs like crap because it doesn't support multiple cpus.
Then again, my ancient dual PIII Xeon compaq proliant loves FBSD 8.0, not so sure such a beast could handle the latest Windows server (though it did come with 2k3 server standard on it, I swear I nuked that install the moment I got the machine), not willing to try it either. I somehow doubt that most people have computers this old though, I'm sure some do. I was asked to "fix" a 486 running Win 98SE about 2 years ago. They wanted me to upgrade it so it could play the latest games... I felt so bad for the owner that I burned all 420mb of their hdd to a CD, threw out the computer, and gave them a newer one (admittedly, it wasn't a great system, 800MHz PIII but basically the best system I had aside from my laptop and athlon xp main desktop) loaded with XP. I don't know why the non-savvy think they can use the same computer for almost 20 years and expect it to be anywhere near as capable as a modern system, it had an ISA network card complete with BNC connector for crying out loud! In the end I couldn't bring myself to even bother charging them for the work.
Hah! Still had to textwall it, oh well. Be glad I deleted the 4 paragraph rant about XP's inferior memory management compared to Vista and 7. And the two paragraphs on how GNU hasn't seen a major release since 1997 and that all Linux users use a 13 year old OS.
I will agree that the typical user really shouldn't and doesn't need loads of memory or a fast CPU, and that Windows is kinda bloaty, but the fact of the matter is that all OSes experience bloat. Look at the Linux kernel, 2.6.x is ten times the size of 2.0.x kernels! And as for kernels, Windows has a hybrid kernel, which arguably is much safer for the system for the the average non-tech-savvy user to be on since they're not doing everything in kernel mode. I could go on for hours if I let myself, practically have.
e: Why does it seem like I'm the only person who's been using Windows in all it's forms for 20 years without any problems (excepting that trash that was ME, though there are ways of making stable) that were a direct result of the OS and not a hardware failure.
