Before you throw away your MacBook, also consider that a lot of the 'ecosystem', e.g. the way you install libraries such as NLTK have a 1 step process for installation on Mac/Linux and a may-or-may-not-work multistep process for Windows, with sometimes sheepish apologies from maintainers of said libraries that sometimes they simply couldn't get it working and couldn't afford to waste any more time on it.

Example: http://www.pitt.edu/~naraehan/python2/faq.html Read the question "How do I install NLTK 3.0 (Windows)?"

Or you could just use anaconda and type 'conda install nltk'.

edit: most of the steps in the instructions you linked to are how to install pip, which is now included if you install the latest version of python. So on a current version of python the instructions should reduce to run:

   pip install pyyaml nltk

You are reinforcing my point in a way.

If you look at the nltk site's docs on installing on Windows [1], you see there isn't even any mention of anaconda. In fact, there is basically a set of links asking you to go and figure it out for yourself. Either the maintainers of the NLTK project are not aware that there is a better way (using anaconda like you suggest) or they are aware but haven't seen any good reason to update their documentation.

So why do they (and broadly the 'ecosystem') not update their docs to be more Windows friendly, or to even develop their software so as to be pain free to install on Windows in the first place?

That is the ecosystem effect at play here. How many people are likely to stumble on to your comment when they search "install nltk on windows"? On second thoughts, with my double quotes and all, now they might :-)

[1] http://www.nltk.org/install.html

Yea, I suppose I cannot really deny that using python on windows is occasionally very slightly harder than on Linux. And many developers are ignorant of windows and don't write good/any windows documentation. But by the same token it has gotten dramatically better over the past couple of years, and there are now people within Microsoft actually working on improving the Python on Windows experience.