You can lock down and secure any OS given enough time, effort and ingenuity. My Windows VMs seem to run along happily without any serious complications. My one physical window system has been largely happy.
That being said, when my mom's computer died the last time I told her that if she wanted me to fix it, it had to be a Mac, if for no other reason than the hardware is more uniform, so it's easier to write a stable os. Other htan having some printer issues, it's worked great.

That is the biggest problem with windows. You install a program, it craps all over the registry, and uniinstall leaves kruft there. Do that a few dozen times and you have a machine utterly incapable of booting. I spent entire weekends fixing PCS like that. *NIX (including MacOs) doesn't get that krufty, at least with something that gets loaded into memory like the registry. Hmm. Maybe Windows 7 should have a /etc directory?

fire them from a Rail gun into a concrete wall. Get the Drive wipe and catastrophic impact all in one neat, tidy package.