"I can't help thinking that it was in the main interest of Microsoft to demonstrate that an OS's consistency and reliability are more important than innovation, especially after the headaches of Vista."

Well, no: They hadn't any choice but sell yet another repackaged version of NT. Vista was and is a nightmare, so you sell yet another vesion of XP with DRM-kernel from Vista. That's Windows 8: Old pieces, new version. Not really innovation, but repackaging. An art by itself, I'll admit.

If you rip off unnecessary cruft and eye candy (=classic look), what is the fundamental difference between 7 and NT, besides DRM and some drivers (easy to write to any OS) ? Yet another version of ActiveX?

I'd say there aren't any, except 64-bit version. But even NT had it (not on intel-platform, but that's another story).

"Because there was no such thing as an "mp3" format 10 years ago!"

Winplay3 v2.0 is dated 28.10.1996. How do I know? I have that and there was a lot of mp3's available then. Format itself is older.

" And cellphones were, well, cellphones. Even stuff like "digital cellphones", "SMS" and even "Caller ID" were either premiums or nonexistant.""

Really? Nokia 3110 was released 1997 and it's a GSM (=digital) phone with SMS-capability and Caller-ID display as standard, at least here in Finland. 2110 is even older.

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_3110-23.php