Unix never made inroads on the desktop.
Commercial Unix workstations had a decent desktop for its time, but they were too expensive. Their private hardware was the primary reason of their excessive cost. Still they were not eager to offer their OS for PC, when PC became power enough to run UNIX OSes. Though, there were some commercial UNIX OS for i386 in the early 1990s, they were too expensive for private users. By his own admission, Linus would never write his own OS if he could just buy a commercial Unix OS for a reasonable price.
Linux has been ready for the desktop since about 1999
I use Linux desktop since 1997, and I know people who started to use it before me. However, when it comes to regular people, Ubuntu became the first distro usable by non-technical crowd. (BTW, personally, I still prefer Debian over Ubuntu, but that's another story...)
I'm writing this on Windows but that's only because Windows came on this machine, I'll be installing Linux when I have a week of downtime.
In this regard, my experience is very different than yours. If I had a machine with pre-installed Windows, it would take me a week to install all software that I regularly use, and then I had to change a lot of default settings, which is really annoying. On the other hand, it takes me one day to install a Linux distro from scratch with all required software, and I am ready to go.
In any case, the reason why we don't have more Linux desktops has nothing to do with the Linux kernel. If you want to have a good desktop, having a good kernel does not really matter that much. On the other hand, if you want to build a supercomputer, the kernel is the crucial part of your system.