This has nothing to do with the OS and everything to do with crappy vendors.
I supported Rockwell and Modicon PLC systems for a few years and those key disks can be a royal pain. There is nothing like having a harddrive go at midnight on a Saturday and having the Rockwell tech tell you that they need to mail you a new key disk because yours has gone bad. Uh, production is down and we are losing thousands of dollars because I have a bad floppy?
That happened to me once and after that I always had a backup of the key disk.
As far as their servers reading my machines... Over my dead body. Good luck on getting onto my network and through the firewall the protects my PLC subnet.
