I never said it was lackluster, I said that it was equivalent. The differences lie around how asynchronous thread signals are delivered and handled. Win32 is less flexible in that regard, and when you're writing any kind of cross platform threaded software which includes Win32, you must make accommodations for this difference. Pthreads can't be fully emulated on Win32, so you have to have your pthread path, and your win32 path.

And yes, you correctly point out that on nix and Win32, interaction with the kernel is often different. Win32 does a lot right, I won't ever speak negatively of it, it is the desktop OS of choice by a huge margin. It's just that nix and Win32 are so different from each other, that you can't generally write a single implementation of your low level thread interaction for both classes of platforms.