Re: It is easy
I had this discussion with a colleague while standing outside in "meeting room 5" a few weeks ago. We were discussing the more general issue of Operating System Evangelism as a curse, nay a pox, upon humanity as a whole. The general consensus following the application of copious amounts of mild stimulant via both respiratory and digestive tracts was that an operating system's job is to abstract hardware and then stay out of the way. If you're spending more time tinkering with the OS than doing Useful Stuff™, the OS is doing it wrong. The corollary to that is if the OS is shiny and full o' features enough to make you excited about it, it's too bloated in the first place, especially if it needs a GPU with the power of an early 2000's supercomputer and more memory bandwidth than most of us had for VRAM just a few years ago just to render the window decorations.
In a perfect world, you'd get perhaps hardware abstraction, a window manager of suitable flexibility so you could make it look comfortably nice and personalised and a package installer and set of A[B|P]Is with which to interact with all the boring under-the-hood bits to attract devs, who would then make the other bits you would like. It'll never happen, of course, because people are used to being "force fed" instant gratification and will not, under any circumstances, consider what they actually *need* from a general purpose computing platform, workstation or desktop.
What really irks me about the commercial side of the deal is how tightly integrated MS's operating system progression is with hardware vendors' need to perpetuate sales, even when the current crop of hardware is more than adequate for most people's usage patterns - and then we get blasted by various ecomentalists for being "consumers" and "feeding landfill" because we have bugger all choice but to upgrade. To be frank, I don't really care whose UI I'm using, I just want to get my day's work done without open wallet surgery or intrusive ads, irrelevant mithering from the underlying bad decisions made by committee or pointless features that I don't - and probably never will - need. It's not just MS, of course. All the phobile moan people do the same thing and even the flossie crowd keep finding new ways to use up all that Moore's law gain with pointless and irrelevant - but very shiny - fluff.
Look at the security implications, too: If your desktop is yours, that one annoying chap in every office will probably take one look at it on the one occasion you forget to lock it and decide to either change someone else's screensaver to print a very rude word 500 times or just swap your mouse dongle with someone else using a Logitech Ubiquitous Wireless Mouse Type M175. Again.