You and others make a good point about getting going faster on windows, but one thing that a lot of people don't factor in is the amount of time fiddling with windows as well. Getting it working or fixing problems and other configuration probs. And not all hardware works well under windows or the latest version of windows. There is some real time spent trying to configure windows as well.
The main problem that the article presents is that windows acts like malware which brings a new element to your desktop. I remember getting a popup notification from facebook, this after I thought I turned off all of that stuff. You don't face that in linux. You did with some earlier versions of Ubuntu, but not anymore.
No doubt, windows brings computing to people who aren't technical and makes it easy, but anything beyond the most simple configuration will take a lot of time as well.