I wish I had the same optimism. I have a Fedora partition that gets wiped and reinstalled every release and there's always some showstopper or things are slightly worse that make me unable to commit. I'm not settling for 'slightly worse'. The display server situation on Linux is depressing.
I don't like were Microsoft is heading, but it's way too early to claim Windows is dead.
I agree with your point though - Windows is not dead; for me its a lot of the photo editing applications that I want to use don't run well on Linux.
I think that's exactly the problem. It's too alive, so they can bastardize the experience in any way.
Because it's a partition I use to test Linux and rather than upgrade I'd rather start over from scratch.
As for the distro choice, Fedora is ahead of Ubuntu but not as bleeding edge as Arch.
I'm sure there's plenty arguments for using x distro over y. Fedora is just what I landed on.