There are those who insist it's still 1989 and haven't a clue what Windows and OS X have done over the past two decades.
Possibly. I look at my friends computers and see how they run. Not really interested in theoretical performance.
Its a bit sad really. My wife's G4 laptop with 512 megs of ram runs slightly slower, as a friend of mines desktop with vista and 2 gigs of ram.
My desktop came with a vista install and it was crawling with 4 gigs of ram before I wiped it.
7 seems to be better about actually doing stuff, though watching my friend Rubens netbook try to boot with 7 was a painful experience. I guess they are pretty much just giving up on that market and letting Google take it.
The desktops at work are mostly xp, with a few being updated to 7, and again, crawling, though its possible the network setup is whats doing the damage here.
The XP machines arent any better though.
I make it a point of checking out new windows releases, as I know a few people who always stay on top of the upgrade curve.