In my own experience on over a dozen computers since 2000 when I started to get serious about Linux and especially the past 7 to 8 years...Linux driver support exceeds Windows.
With windows, its likely the base OS may not even be able to install on a piece of hardware without a driver update CD, but the driver support is fantastic. Its possible to run XP on a lot of modern hardware because companies like nvidia continue to make drivers for XP. That is not possible with any linux distribution from that time frame.
The opposite also exists, I have a baytrail tablet I picked up over Christmas. It runs win8.1 just fine, and will sort of boot the latest bleeding edge ubuntu, but the wifi still doesn't work (as of a couple weeks ago), nor does the SD controller, and a few other things are suboptimal.
There are also whole product lines that still don't work in linux (see the USB3 displaylink based products) even years after their initial release.
Plus, linux tends to put users in a sticky situation. For example at work I have a fairly recent intel based platform, that doesn't work 100% in the older (still supported) SLES environment we use by default. That is because the drivers need to be backported by SUSE and they aren't exactly on the ball about it (same thing for the LTS releases of ubuntu).
I'm a pretty strong believer that linux needs to decouple the drivers from the core kernel. I don't necessarily want to upgrade my whole OS platform just because I got a new piece of hardware. This is especially true on stable platforms. Thankfully companies like emulex do a good job of providing two dozen different drivers for different versions of linux. They and a few other companies are the exception not the rule.
- Windows sells because it works with every hardware device ever made. Linux does not even come close to that level of hardware support. There is no way those drivers will run on MS Linux kernel.
- None of Microsoft's top money making apps are built with .Net; Office, Visual Studio or Sql Server are mostly C++. So it isn't as easy as porting .Net over to Linux.
- Windows Driver development tooling is way ahead of Linux. So while we all love Linux, throwing away the entire Windows kernel is a bad idea.
- The Windows NT kernel is not an awkward piece of engineering. While different from the *nix, it is actually quite respectable.
- Add: MS mobile device strategy too is based on the NT kernel. They are not going to be an Android theme.
What they really wanna do is make windows more text-shell friendly, and perhaps Open Source the NT kernel. But more than anything else, I just want Microsoft to switch sides when it comes to Patents and IP extortion.