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The difference is as much in philosophy as anything. Windows provides the bare minimum of features and expects you to buy upgrades and proprietary programs to make up the difference.
that's simply not true. Windows is a feature rich OS delivering much more than a base system in a freebsd sense. There are a shell, a editor, a paint program, and a good-for-most word processor: the typical combination we know from classical mac, but more advanced and more featured. Furthermore the user quickly finds out how to install additional ms packages for free, like supershell, and lots of tools. And others like our beloved chrome/mozilla based browsers/mua's, vi/emacs, and open/libreoffice packages. There is a lot of software freely available at windows planet, and lots of typical *nix software around there..
Some of my brothers at TUHS are running windows, just a couple of minutes ago I read some kernel utils code by a very prominent kernel hacker including a #ifdef WIN32 directive, and its OK doing so. ms isn't evil and gates isn't the devil.
But for me a *nix system is better. Its faster, performs better, and is much more transparent, thus I know what's going on on my machine, whereas windows is, what John Socha (NC) said, a giant moloch, too big, and too nanny a-like.