... add yet another component into the system that could be compromised and possibly even install a persistent and unremovable threat. Brilliant.

Why do you think it's replacing WiFi? The article clearly states;

x86 isn't dying. But you're right, MS and everybody needs this. The truly ironic part is that Apple already has it's OS running on ARM, and yet Microsoft is going to beat them to the punch on ARM-powered notebooks. (Yes, Chromebooks technically were already there, but this is the first mainstream, general-purpose OS.)

With cheap ARM-powered notebooks with a 20+ hour battery life, this is definitely going to shake things up.

Did you read the linked article at all? You must've missed the part about the WoW being extended to provide x86 emulation on ARM. Most existing Windows apps will run on it, and the emulation will be refined as they have more real-world examples of what works and what doesn't.

Agreed. I use Ubuntu on dozens of servers, I have a dual-boot Ubuntu partition on my Thinkpad. It works well for servers. It works well for embedded. It doesn't work well on the desktop. There are too many applications I need to use on a regular basis that are either Windows-only or just plain better under Windows. Heck, Ubuntu is built into Windows at this point with the WSL. I run Linux applications side-by-side with Windows applications on my desktop with *no virtualization or emulation required*. You can't do that under straight-up Ubuntu. Windows 10 is fast and secure. It sounds though that in this case, the real driver is Office. And I'm not surprised. I have people send me spreadsheets all the time in .xlsx format, and a lot of them are either unreadable by Excel or load with errors. Sometimes they're from LibreOffice, but most of the time they're from Google Sheets.

Nobody needs to install Cygwin, and you can run Ubuntu and Windows at the same time on Windows 10 using the WSL, without emulation or virtual machines. So that covers 2 out of 3, and in the end, who wants to run macOS if they have Windows and Linux already?