I feel that Windows 7 was really the pinnacle UI for desktops... I kind of dig Unity, as it's similar enough for me. I do prefer a bash prompt to CMD though.

I don't think node on Windows is so bad these days once you've got Python 2.x and VS 2015 Community installed... When I started with node (0.6-0.8 era), it was pretty bad in Windows. These days most popular modules just work, or work once you have gyp prereq's installed.