Just a few days ago there was post about how NT's IO by default is more performant.
Yeah, the NT kernel design is pretty frickin awesome. There is a great book about the run up to NT's release. He took on the job because he thought that writing operating systems would happen fewer and fewer times in the future. I think he actually said that he thought this might be one of the last times a commercial OS would be written from scratch.
The thing about operating systems is that everyone thinks they know everything there is to know, but wow are they off the mark.
The idea that windows=bad across the board is terrible.
Most don't even know what VMS is/was.