This irked me. It's just an unnecessary comparison. The ZDnet article linked is, and always was, completely fallacious in comparing an OS critical update channel to a fully-fledged distro package manager. Having just bought a brand new Windows laptop this weekend, I found myself spending no less than 2 hours tirelessly updating and rebooting Windows, and searching for, and installing, driver updates manually. It's 2014 and it still sucks. Windows update and OEM updaters are, in my experience, piss-poor and don't pick up half of the updates available to your average system.
Frankly I think your average Linux desktop could easily risk doubling or tripling the number and frequency of reboots demanded, and you'd still not reach a significant fraction of the annoyance of Windows on that particular front.