Parapunter said - "Most problems that I see are caused by software & hardware vendors rather than MS itself, after all, vista was in development for five plus years - the 3rd party community are a little disingenous to come out & say they don't have compatible software, drivers etc when they've had plenty of time to patch/update theur products."
Vista has been in dev for longer than that, but they decided the codebase was such a mess that they did a complete restart 3 years ago. It's now just a different kind of mess. Since MS only publishes a limited subset of the system APIs (and makes you pay for the SDK) and the codebase is closed, writing drivers is somewhat unpredictable. And, of course, you have to pay MS for driver signing (which doesn't mean they're bug free) before the OS will even attempt to load them.
MS is not particularly developer friendly.
Mac
PS: In fairness, many of the Linux kernel API's change with each new release. But at least the code is open and you can see what's and why. Much more dev friendly.