Another pet peeve of mine is Windows' driver support. It's atrocious. Answer me why I can't install Windows and have all my hardware just work? Linux is capable of doing this. But with Windows, I can't even expect my networking to work out of the box. I have to hunt for a driver CD and install the drivers from there. Granted, I'm talking about Windows XP, which is presumably the decade old OS you are talking about. But I've heard plenty of horror stories about Vista/7 from coworkers. (Primarily that even once the drivers are installed, the network is unreliable at best).
The problem with using anecdotal evidence for things like this is everyone has a different story, solely because everyone has what essentially amounts to a different computer. My laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad Y530, has issues with the brightness controls in Ubuntu and OpenSuse. Fedora ran perfectly fine, surprisingly. OpenSuse couldn't even connect to my wireless network correctly, though I'm not entirely sure whether that was a PEBKAC or OpenSuse itself.
Contrast this with Windows 7, which installed perfectly fine, found every single device on the laptop, and then promptly went out and handed me a program that handles energy-usage more efficiently, straight from Lenovo. And people who say Linux works perfectly fine with any hardware you can throw at it have quite clearly not spent any time trying to get obscure wireless cards working or printers that CUPS doesn't handle perfectly working.
Obviously that's all anecdotal, but it's worth showing just how much it contrasts with your story. In reality, both OSes have issues with hardware. At least with Windows, all you generally need to do is hunt down a driver, whereas with Linux it can easily amount to a weeks worth of work.