Your appeal to authority is based on references(Chris Hecker and John Carmack) who were commenting on the state of Direct3D over 10 years ago! Chris Hecker's article discusses execute buffers, a feature in Direct X version 3! John Carmack's .plan is from 1996. Comparing DirectX 3 and DX9 is just silly. The API has drastically changed. Right around DX9 it was doing a better job of exposing the underlying hardware than OGL. As of 2003(the last time I used OpenGL) OGL had all these vendor extensions, which meant you had to write different versions of your code(and your shaders!) to work on different hardware(e.g. NV_VERTEX_PROGRAM/NV_FRAGMENT_PROGRAM was nvidia only, and you needed different code for ATI). They finally came out with ARB extensions that worked on all hardware. Also both Nvidia and ATI had separate extensions for uploading geometry to the GPU for a while. It was a total pain.

Here's one random example where DirectX has more helper functions than OpenGL. DirectX has built in support for Quaternions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb281611(VS.85).aspx
OpenGL does not(you would need to use a custom library). Built in font rendering is another example. You have to load bitmap fonts in OpenGL.

It will enter an infinite loop if days == 366 and IsLeapYear is true.

There is an instant search in the start menu, so you can type in the name of a program or file and it will appear in the start bar. No more hunting through menus(where did did starcraft go? Is it under games, blizzard, starcraft, etc?), and it makes it a lot easier to find your programs. This same search is applied to most of the windows configuration tools. For the control panel, you can also search(e.g., to turn off UAC), and it will filter out the non-relevant entries.

If you hover over programs in the task bar at the bottom of the screen, a preview of the window will render as a popup, which makes it easier to switch between multiple instances of the same program.

I've also found that the wireless networking management is much better than XP's.

>>This would be like a third party mirroring Slashdot's stories without Slashdot's advertisements, costing Slashdot revenue.

No it wouldn't. Slashdot makes money by selling advertising with the promise of eyeballs. RyanAir makes money by selling flights(and other services). This is more about whether they can force people to go through their portal(and thus sell their add-ons). They still make money selling flights. If the other crap was worth it, then maybe more people would buy it. If the flights are loss leaders for their other crap, then their business model is not going to survive the web.

Also, if it was illegal, as you assert, then why wouldn't they just get a legal injunction against these sites? It sounds like this has been going on for a while. The fact that they didn't pursue a legal solution, yet are trying to cause chaos for the sites suggests that they don't have a legal leg to stand on.