No they can't. It's just your selective memory from the time they were a big-ass monopolist that sucked the life from any competing platform to the point where you had to use theirs.

Now, when you are used to high quality design injected by Apple and then refined by competition in the mobile space, your standards have went up so high that you simply can't go back to the half baked buggy interfaces that Microsoft has always produced. The older systems don't /seem that way/ because you are familiar with them.