I use Windows too, but I had to laugh a bit at not having to screw around with drivers etc. I have an ATI card (4870x2 I bought from a friend)...probably 'nuff said right there, but yeah...the drivers are shit. I have to screw around a lot with this thing. YMMV of course, but sometimes it's still a pain in the ass. Linux just has different kinds of problems. Weirder ones. Shit that you wouldn't normally see break...but Windows certainly isn't frustration free. Now I wouldn't even begin to claim that's Microsoft's fault because quite frankly, they've really made some great strides. Vista broke a lot of shit, but it needed to happen. Now we have a more secure system with a better driver model. I love that they finally caught up to Linux like 10 years later and the graphics driver can be reloaded without the system blue screening. My video driver can and has crashed before even with something as simple as playing a Youtube video (granted this is relatively rare and relegated to one bad release here or there), but it's nice the whole damn system doesn't go careening off a cliff when that happens like it used to. The fault mostly lies with ATI writing horribly shitty drivers. They've gotten better than they used to be but they honestly have nothing on nVidia's drivers. I just wish the nVidia cards weren't so damn expensive sometimes. Those middle of the road ATI cards are very attractively priced but after the experience I've had with this card, I'm probably never going to get an ATI card again.
That being said, I actually like to use Windows now with Windows 7. I use as much free software as possible inside (Pidgin, Libre Office, Firefox, and basically anything I can get on PortableApps.com) so I'm doing fairly well there but the system itself is finally just...nice. I don't feel like I'm fighting with it. I did try and use a free alternative to UltraMon (zbar...I have 2 monitors) but that app is kind of a piece of shit. It has a little ways to go...too much bugginess. I go back to Linux now and sort of don't care anymore...especially with how much gaming I do...there's no point to even boot into Linux at this point except to dick around.
I would love to see Linux get some serious prospects at gaming but there are too many distros. I can guarantee if gaming does become serious, it's going to be locked into ONE distro in which case, what's the fucking point? I don't like Ubuntu that much and you KNOW they'd be the target. I dunno...maybe we'd get lucky and they'd define some sort of gaming subset for the various distros. Doesn't matter much though since no one gives a shit yet. I can only hope Steam will one day come to Linux and they'll finally do some serious work on graphics drivers. Performance is terrible and so is the power control stuff. Oh and X. Basically, fuck you if you aren't using the open source ATI driver apparently because you're going to LOVE configuring the damn thing by hand in your xorg conf. Awesome. That's what people want to do. I can't believe in 2011 I still have to open the config file up just because it's a binary driver. Why the hell can't it detect the shit for me like it did when I was using the OSS driver? x_x