When you install a typical, cheap consumer device under Windows (anything: a printer, a joystick, etc.) from the vendor's CD-ROM it usually installs megabytes of bullshit, including automatically-started craplets with shiny but useless owner-drawn GUIs, etc. This is bloat. When I plug-in some USB stuff in my OpenBSD laptop, the kernel spits a few lines on the console to tell it has recognized the device and that's all.
edit: the last releases of Acrobat Reader, huge, very slow and buggy are a very good example of bloat.
Can you come up with a product that starts faster, install faster, requires less memory requirements, and don't crash as much as MS Words but also provides the same amount of features comparable to MS Words?
When I plug my iPod to my Ubuntu version 6.06, Ubuntu crashed my iPod without any informative feedback. When I dmesg-ed, I saw some hex number and some usbX where X is a number.
There are professionals who prefer to pay (and pay big price) and use Photoshop than Snipshot, MS Paint, Paint.NET and others.