Do you actually have experience or are you just making things up? Are are you willing to both write a driver and port the software for me that controls a chemistry instrument that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, uses some proprietary PCI card (or worse yet, ISA)? The instrument runs absolutely fine now, and will for years (I managed one instrument controlled by a Mac from the mid 80s), but would either cost a lot to upgrade to Windows 7, or require a new instrument. Instrumentation companies are like this. They do operate stupidly, are stuck in the 80s, and I'd love to smack them, but like it or not, in vertical industries, the choices are few and far between, and *very* expensive.
So what do you do? The hard part is some of these instruments generate a lot of data and require access to network servers. Dedicated, firewalled LANs will suffice here. Windows XP is going to be running for another ten years or more.
The whole problem revolves around the fact that in many industries computers are treated as "hardware" not "software." I mean you only replace a pump's pressure switch when it fails. We in the computer industry have been successful in pushing our technology into all kinds of places where it's invisible and just seen as a "controller" or a "switch" and treated as such. And it's not entirely the fault of the users of these devices either. The thought of securing and updating the firmware on these devices has really only been something anyone worried about recently. When was the last time you did a firmware update to your lawn sprinkler controller? Add internet capabilities to it, and suddenly it's a security hole requiring weekly software updates. How does this relate to XP? Well for a lot of people and industries, their instruments and devices are in their mind much like the sprinkler controller in your garage. They are just tools and they don't think about the software security, updates, EOL, etc. They've never had to before. It's a brave new world we've started, and this Windows XP EOL issue is just the beginning of our problems with this new "internet of things" idea. Which is brilliant, but fraught with all kinds of danger.