It's a perfectly good commit message, look at the actual diff to see what the typo was...

NT for Alpha actually worked very well, it was considerably faster and more stable than the x86 version.

The problem was a lack of applications... Most windows apps are closed source, and only compiled for x86 which meant you either couldn't run them at all, or you had to run them through emulation which incurred a significant performance hit.

That's why Linux is in much better shape on non x86 architectures than windows, the fact that drivers/apps/etc can easily be recompiled by anyone and in most cases already have been.

Pretty much everything most people would want to do on an x86 linux box, i can also do on an alpha, ppc or arm based linux box... The same is not true with windows.

There are hypervisors for ARM, but most current ARM based servers seem to be geared up towards having lots of small machines rather than a single big machine split into lots of virtual images...
It's really PCs vs Mainframes all over again.

It would sell because its marketed as windows, and then customers would be disappointed because it didnt do the same things their desktop windows does. After a short while, it would earn itself a terrible reputation and people would avoid it, and the existing unwanted devices would show up on ebay very cheaply.

On it's own merit, windows rt offers nothing over android or ios, and at $200 the hardware would at best be the same spec as $200 android hardware if windows were given away for free. On the other hand, its unlikely to be free, so the hardware would be inferior to cover the cost and then you also have a much smaller pool of apps than android/ios devices have.

It's usually even easier than that, a lot of these features are already compile time optional (eg ./configure --without-xxx), and gentoo at least lets you turn various optional features off when you install things via use flags.

Much more than 1% now, most mobile/tablet users don't have flash...

OSX is actually worse than both windows and linux when it comes to backwards compatibility...
No pre OSX apps (pre 2000ish) will run on the current versions of OSX...
No PPC-only (pre 2006) apps will run on the current versions of OSX...
16-bit windows dates from the early 90s, 64bit windows will run 32bit windows apps just fine.

16bit windows/dos is now sufficiently antiquated that its possible to emulate the hardware entirely and get reasonable performance, emulating a ppc machine to boot earlier macos is doable but some of the later ppc apps designed for g5 class systems are likely to perform worse than the real hardware.

For movies it doesn't really matter, so long as you're downloading the file in order and don't need to seek, you can start playing immediately without waiting for it to finish.
It's much worse for software, where you need to download the entire thing up front - and more software than ever is being distributed online these days, even if you obtain it on physical media you will usually get an outdated version which requires downloaded updates.

And remote support was just fine on dialup back in the day too...
As screen resolutions get higher, the bandwidth required for screen sharing goes up.

Pushing everything through the trunk is also inefficient, with a good full duplex connection, local caching and local peering you can get far more efficient use of the trunk... Protocols like bittorrent would work especially well if users were locally peered and had good upstream bandwidth.

With video conferencing you can talk to a much cheaper doctor in india or china... If anything it will push the price down.

Websites will work, but some more bloated sites will load slowly... Really this is the fault of the site designer, but most users won't care about that and just be annoyed by their own slow connection.

A slower connection can be annoying if your waiting for downloads, especially if your trying to play a game which must update itself before it will let you play... The 1mb connection may be enough for gameplay, but it will introduce a significant wait while updating.

Streaming is an annoyance, 1mbps may not be fast enough to stream high def content, but its more than fast enough to download a movie over night for you to watch the following morning.

None of this is critical, but it makes the experience much better.

It's not about sustained throughput so much as ability to finish things quickly and get back to an idle state...
With 2mbps i could keep the line maxed out for hours on end, with 100mbps i do the same things but its bursty and the line mostly sits idle.
Modern websites get quite bloated these days, especially poorly designed ones, a fast connection improves loading speed quite significantly...

Depending on latency, buffer sizes and tcp window scaling etc, a single connection is usually much slower than multiple connections used by torrents...
Depending on the window scaling settings at either end, your machine may only process up to 64kb of data (per tcp connection) before it needs to send an acknowledgement, which can result in very poor performance over high latency and/or long distance links.

Many applications install the startup widget without asking, and often without informing the user at all. It could be solved through the use of a proper package manager and standard package format so that the package manager rather than an arbitrary installer program actually controls the installation and always gives the user the choice.