Ok. Now I know that some of what I touched upon can be band-aided by using Wine and such, but come on. That's cheating. If the OS can't natively run the software, and has to do so in a virtual-Windows environment, why not just use Windows?
Well, how else do you propose to run Windows software on Linux? Win32 is closed, and wine would have to replicate all of its bugs to substitute it. We would need Microsoft to start developing its software for Linux as well, which likely won't happen no matter how much marketshare we get, and of course there's also the issue of getting that marketshare with zero marketing and the issues you discussed. I suppose that the low level API's could be robustified to increase adoption of Linux as a platform for high-end media content development, but the compatibility issue would persist. Bottom line, wine is not cheating, its the only hope we have of running Windows software on Linux.
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. -- Paul Erlich