[...]desperately trying to find reasons to cling onto XP when NONE exist.
I can think of one, which is why people are still using XP. The sheer hassle of installing something else and making sure all important stuff is copied across. If you've got a bunch of stuff installed then you have to go set up the new system, install stuff, swear a lot if suddenly your original install disks don't work on the new OS, etc. That level of upgrade is major pain, and until superseded by the pain of being hacked, is likely to be the limiting factor.
I finally got my son to ditch his XP system when I showed him that I had all his favourite applications running on Linux. The XP install is still there (the machine is dual-boot), but next time I upgrade his system it will lose that.