Re: Windows 10?
You forgot 2K which was also good.
And Vista wasn't rubbish - it just came supplied on a lot of terrible hardware.
Pre SP1, XP was anything but good. I'd say fuckawful, actually. No security by default, firewall turned off, IE6 doing its awful, awful thing.... nope, can't think of a single good thing about XP at release.
Basically, this whole "alternating versions" meme is bullshit.