> Very few people could write or speak with such precision about the internals of Microsoft kit

Indeed, he "wrote the book" on it, which is apparently freely available as PDF now [1].

As someone who knows nothing about OS's, I picked up a cheap copy out of curiosity, and found it highly readable and enlightening (until it got rained on somewhere around chapter 10).

EDIT: Do you have a link to the "fails" talk? I've been using Azure for the last few months and have been extremely impressed so far.

[1] https://www.google.com/#q=windows+internals+russinovich+pdf