I wonder why you say it was hard to find - it's always been under the View tab in Folder Options.

Maybe because of the Control Panel revamp, or the fact that the menu-bar is hidden by default in Explorer windows?

I've been using Windows 7 at work for about a year, and I had absolutely no idea that the menu will show up when I hit the alt key until exactly 2 days ago. Every time I needed something from it I'd just rummage around all the visible menus, not find it, curse my head off and open up the command prompt.

I'm not sure which will look dumber as a consequence of this post: me or the Windows 7 UI.

Don't feel too bad. I've been using Windows 7 since shortly after it came out and I had no idea until I just read your post.

It's due to the hidden menu, same drill with Office 2010 and finding "Save As.." etc, I've never been much for just using the keyboard, I like using the mouse to navigate the menus ;)

I don't. I generally leave that off, especially on my mac. If I want to see hidden files, I launch a terminal and list all files.