I will grant you that he does sometimes say things on LKML that are inflammatory or at least angry (less so these days to be sure) but personally I prefer the unfiltered honesty. I believe most humans can admit that they've felt like Linus does in his rants at times. People have criticized the way that he speaks, but I believe his anger is very often because he cares about the users.
He can get pretty heated in arguments on the LKML for sure, but those are arguments between devs, and usually for the benefit of the user.
I still think this way of working out disagreements sucks, but as a user it does not really affect me at all.
And other OS'es abuse their users on a whole other level and I'm quite sore that some of apples/microsofts middle managers can also be quite abusive to their devs behind closed doors, with linux it's just all in the open...
> We don't merge kernel code just because user space was written by a retarded monkey on crack
- Linus Torvalds
These are examples of a committed champion and friend of users defending their interests.
We might disagree on the definition of abusive though.