Aside of the (slightly) transactional support, MSIs also allow for easy centralised deployment and because correctly authored MSIs are declarative only, an admin can potentially audit the installation process before running it.
Finally, when you kill dpkg or rpm at the right time, you will have an equally non-working install under your Linux distro as you will have a non-working install of your MSI file when you kill msiexec at the right time.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with you that MSI is suffering from overengineering and I agree that the UI is really messy, especially with regards to updates, but instead of trying to find different, less standardized installers, we should invest in better tooling (compared to WiX) and maybe tell Microsoft what we need changed.
[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh8...
I don't think it is possible to make Windows installers fully transactional, but architecture astronauts from Microsoft did their best to pretend that MSI is actually capable of transacted installs. Which is why MSI is such a horrorshow.