Most netbooks offer Linux as an option and due to no Windows tax they are usually either cheaper or make up with it with better hardware than their Windows counterparts.

Not even nearly true anymore. Microsoft freaked out about the linux netbook phenomenon and slashed the price of XP on netbooks. Combine that with the awfulness of the early netbook distros, and it was an easy decision for netbook manufacturers to go with Microsoft again.

I'm hopeful the netbook wars are starting again in six months or so but we'll have to see. In the meantime we just have to admit that Microsoft owns that market as well.

I used the term 'pretty much' because I knew I'd be corrected otherwise (by several disagreeing posters rooting for StG44, Cei-Rigotti, Mondragon, Fedorov Avtomat or whatever else): with hindsight I agree that my hint was not clear enough.

I wonder if there is something else I failed at conveying since my post is now marked flamebait? That was definitely not the intention.

An AK-47 is semi-auto, not full-auto, so your question is irrelevant.

There may be semi-auto versions available for hobbyists, but as a general statement that is just wrong. The AK-47 is definitely a proper assault rifle capable of emptying the 30 round magazine in 3 seconds if need be. In fact it is pretty much the mother of all assault rifles, copied dozens of times around the world.

Advertising something as "multi-platform" is a joke when one platform is always at least one version ahead of the other platforms: it looks like silverlight 3 support will be available on Windows before Moonlight actually supports silverlight 2.

Now, keeping things that way might not be Microsofts intention in this case but knowing their track record I'm not betting on it.

Why should I, as a Windows Admin, have to write an incredibly long and painfully meticulous netsh command to allow something past my firewall when I can just click my way to network settings?
...
Step back a second, and ask all of those questions with their Linux counterparts. The answer turns into "BECAUSE THERE IS NO OTHER RELIABLE AND UNIFORM WAY TO DO SO."

Reliable and uniform -- not the words I would have have used in context of windows administration. The problem with windows administration (and I mostly mean 3rd party server software, but also Microsoft stuff) is that often the GUI is the only sane way to do things -- the cli interface, if it exists, is an afterthought. So automating anything is impossible or hard and debugging problems becomes a game of guesswork.

Yeah, that may be an unfair extrapolation from my experience that includes some fairly bad software vendors and it might even be outdated (as I haven't touched windows in years). Still, that is one of the reasons I prefer not to have anything to do with Windows, at home or at work.