And mixture my experence is the opersite to yours.
Fair enough, different circumstances, different exerpiences.
However, let me give you a concrete example:
Say I'm doing a PXE install of Windows 2008 (no, I'm not going to get into OS wars here, both Linux and Windows have their place) onto a rack full of HP Proliant DL380s.
One of them is bluescreening.
The ability to (a) see the bluescceen, (b) do a hard power cycle (c) PXE boot some diagnostic tools and play with BIOS settings ...... all from hundreds of miles away .... is priceless and enables me to decide what replacement parts need to be sent to site.
Or if you want an example from the non-windows world..... remote upgrades of OpenBSD boxes, booting into single user mode on Linux, Firmware upgrades etc. etc.
Even the commercial flavours of linux don't really cut the mustard at high loads.
If you want a fly websever setup it can manage. Anything serious it falls over.
Oh right... why do people like Amazon run mission-critical Oracle RAC Databases on Linux running on commodity HP Proliants then ? What a load of codswallop, Linux is perfectly capable of supporting loads.
Want more examples ? How about ITV's F1 website... that uses a linux platform for load balancing....
4000 concurrent connections to a video rich site. CPU utilisation 1% memory utilisation 500Mb of the 8GB available. Pair of HP DL360 G5 8GB RAM, 1Gb NICs (in active passive config).
Another application (same hardware spec):
1.2 Million transactions per minute
72 million transactions per hour (including in excess of 350 SSL terminations per second) sustained 750Mbps.