The compatibility issues are because not as many developers make for Linux, because there is a lack of userbase. And the lack of userbase can be attributed to the lack of compatibility, so....it's an impasse.
Chicken-and-egg, huh?
I'm also thinking of incompatibility between certain software that were explicitly tested for a select few distributions, too. Sometimes I wish these software got along.
I'm also of the opinion that if you ever had poor default options out-of-the-box for the average Joe, you have pretty much failed in making a good desktop user's OS. I prefer to keep set-up time to a minimum outside of missing drivers (which is basically a fact of life on any OS that didn't come pre-installed, really). I'm also in the camp where a desktop user's OS shouldn't even bother forcing the user to get to the command prompt or a similar shell just to get certain system-level tasks done, either. (I'll admit, the GUI tools are getting better every day, but I'd rather prefer that everything is there. Hopefully that has changed for the better.)
Operating systems that attempt to cater to power users tend to...fail.
Linux feels more "lightweight" as an OS to me than Windows, and I can't say I'm a huge fan of Microsoft either.
I'd probably agree with you on that, but there's also the beauty of an operating system that can work with everything.
In addition, Windows requirements ha been on a standstill for almost a decade, while the baseline hardware that you can get today have just kept getting better. We're now at the point where $99 Windows tablets can run pretty well and play some last-generation console ports. These systems are more than fast enough for most productivity tasks, too - the current Intel Atoms have about the same aggregate performance as a Core 2 Duo, and that thing is still perfectly workable today. (Intel really got it with Conroe.)
If Windows can ship with such devices and run well, I wonder if there's even a place for Linux on the desktop.
Speaking of computers, I think I'm going to just keep wondering what I'll be getting as a replacement for my Surface RT.