I agree with everything you said except the 'speed' part.
Eclipse in my experience is consistently faster than Netbeans (at least for small projects, any big project I do in Netbeans).
I don't know if you've ever actually used the ribbon, but every single button on the ribbon remains in the same place, it never changes. Static is in fact a big emphasis on the ribbon design you cannot move anything around.
The only 'context sensitive' part of it is that an additional tab opens up when you select a picture or table which gives you functionality for that table, but that tab always appears in the same place and the contents of that tab are also static.
In fact as a Firefox user I am pretty sure this feature started with Firefox before it made its way to IE
You can still use hotkeys on the ribbon (in fact when you hit alt it even helpfully shows you all the key hints), and it exposes a lot more functionality in fewer mouse clicks than the traditional menu.
I was skeptical of the ribbon at first, but now I love it.
Note that if you run as a non-administrator account in Vista and try to do something that requires privilege escalation you get a password prompt on the UAC alert (exactly like in Linux or OSX).
If you run on an administrator account UAC only requires a mouse click to escalate your privileges.
Personally I'm surprised at people who'd used Linux before complaining about UAC, you'd think working with Linux would have taught them, the benefits of escalation password prompts and being able to run with limited privileges and escalating only if necessary
On the other hand, there are many past instances where pilots have panicked when things went bad and made terrible decisions that made things worse.
So pilots aren't immune from panicking in a sticky situation.
Same here, this feature is absolutely awful and it boggles my mind why this is not disabled in Vista and Windows 7
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.