Re:An important difference (Score 1)

This is an add-on layer, not an integral part of the OS. Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command?

Ever heard of iisreset? I can restart IIS on a remote server from my local machine, provided I have set up the IIS server to allow such.

Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones? (And yes, I do these things all the time.)

Yes. They're called batch files. Set up a batch file that executes some vbscript using cscript. It's a decent version of shell scripts.

To be clear, I dislike working in Windows as much as the next guy. I'd rather be running two dozen Linux boxen than the two dozen Windows boxen I have, but unfortunately you can't drop an existing infrastructure overnight. Migration from one platform to another is not easy, and takes lots of time... Not to mention the costs involved.