It's funny that some of the areas that he touches on are also things where Windows requires local admin. Clearly a messed up privileged action model seems to be common across OSes.
You know that UAC prompt you get when running setup.exe for an IM client? Ever wondered why there's an UAC prompt in the first place? Because Windows assumes that setup.exe needs admin privileges (unless .exe explicitly states that it doesn't). This piece of engineering doesn't even have a concept of ~/bin. In fact, there is/was an official W7 guideline that said that all programs must go into %ProgramFiles%, which is a system directory. Now, what sort of a imbecile decided that it's a good idea to let an underprivileged account install into a system directory - UAC or not - is beyond me. So, please, don't mix Windows in. While Linux distros have their dark moments, Windows is just one big service pack now.
You can install to c:\Users\%USERNAME% if you want to, if the installer lets you pick a path, this is how Chrome installs. Just like you can install into ~/bin if you want to, but you are going to have to go a little out of your way to do it.
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb76...
> And if you try and install into C:\Users\...\Program Files, you will quickly be mis-detected as malware or spyware
So it's Windows's fault if you use crappy anti-virus applications? If you'd use similar applications on Linux wouldn't it equally flag ~/bin as malware too?
Unprivileged accounts do not have write access to %ProgramFiles% by default in Windows.