Comment Re:I've never shorted a stock (Score 1) 99
There was one major feature, and two "features" added to XP:
1: The zone/firewalling support. This is actually useful just to keep dodgy apps from opening up a port or ensuring nothing can connect directly. Third parties like Zone Alarm had this functionality, but would keep prompting the user for every single connection, so eventually users would just click "allow all and don't bug me", and be done with it.
2: Secure Audio Path, where anything protected with WMA's DRM could only play on a stack of signed audio drivers.
3: Activation.
Of course, there were some other minor tweaks here and there, but the leap from W2K to XP wasn't groundbreaking. Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 was a major leap in virtually everything. The second greatest leap was with the server side -- Windows 2000 Server from NT Server was a nice leap for servers because the whole model of NT domains was changed to be a lot more scalable.
The reason why XP was considered decent is because it was out for a long time and people got used to it. On the server side of the house, Windows Server 2003 is still supported until July 14 of next year... but most places have moved to at least Windows Server 2008 if not newer just because of the better security in more recent versions.