The main problem with those sets of mutually exclusive choices is that they are not clearly documented - nobody spells it out for you, since it would imply admitting linux ain't the perfect solution, and would get you all the fanatics on attack - you cannot make an informed decision up front, and it is frustrating.

On Windows you can run any program alongside any other & 99% of the time there will be no conflicts.

I think it’s more like this – I’m guessing though -

As it is right now, let’s say you drove a Chevy all your life. For 6 or 7 years. You learned this Chevy, you tested in the Chevy, you kept driving it. When it came to “upgrade” you decided to stick with same Chevy model, anyway. Your friends all have them, all your accessories, like the steering wheel cover, the floor mats, the (I’m stretching here) [insert Chevy-specific mod/addon here]. Needless to say, you only ever used one manufacturer’s implementation of the automobile.

So you walk into a rent-a-car shop when you’re on vacation. They have several models on display. All Chevy. There’s a small section to the side with small glossy white Hondas, but no Toyotas to be found. You haven’t even heard of Toyota at this point. So the rent-a-car guy asks you what model you want to drive.

“Chevy [Whatever]” you say.

Would you like to use one of these glossy white roadsters over here? It’s better performance, but only slightly pricier.

“No thanks, I’ll stick with what I know.”

Here’s the kicker – He doesn’t even tell you he’ll give you the Toyota model, which runs better than your Chevy, for less money than the Chevy.

Let’s say you’ve heard of this Toyota, though, through a friend. You ask about it. “Oh, we don’t have those in the store, though, but you can step right across the street, they probably have them.”

Oh, no thanks, I’ll stick with the Chevy.

Let’s say that somehow you actually got to the point where you’re sitting down in the Honda or the Toyota. You take a glance around and suppose you do spot the cruise, and A/C, and everything. You could spend only a few seconds learning how it works, and you could even ask the salesman a question… he’s right there.
But you have the option of the Chevy, still, and it is what you know and it is easily accessible. Even if it’s in your complete ability to learn how to drive this very similar car, the motivation to do so is very very low. Also, maybe you notice you can’t fit your cute fluffy headrest (I’m stretching here again) around the headrest of said new car. The salesman will give you a free alternative, but it won’t be the same, for some reason, even when it feels almost exactly the same. And why go through the trouble of using something else, when you still have what you know, right there?

Humans are lazy. They are also stubborn.

So, you walk into a Best Buy and you see a slew of Windows PCs running Windows Vista, or soon, 7. You know XP, so you know the start button, you know the context menus, you know the taskbar.
You see the Mac section. The BB employee says those are a bit pricier, but it’s got better performance. You have never heard of Linux, and the BB employee doesn’t say anything about it, despite it being free. If you ask about it, maybe he does know you can go over to a Linux distro site and download/burn a Live CD. If you actually get to a Linux or Mac desktop, sure, you might be able to figure out the GNOME desktop or Mac Dock, et al, on your own in a few short minutes. You might even have a friend, an employee, or Google to aid you as well. However, right next to you in Best Buy (or on your computer’s current partition if you’re testing a LiveCD) is what you know. What you have always known. You can’t even run some random Microsoft software that you always used. Sure, you could find an alternative, but what you already know is right here, available to you. You have no motivation to try this new system. You’re too stubborn and lazy to alter the status quo. Windows has crashed before, but you can always reboot it. You know how long it’ll take to get back online with what you know, but you fear the unknown of the desktop.

Now, this covers why someone wouldn’t switch gears from Windows to Linux or OS X as their main system.
As for, say, my dad borrowing my Ubuntu PC for only a minute to check his checking account, and having to stop and ask “How do I do this?” without looking for the Firefox icon he knows, right on my Panel, right where his own Firefox would be in Windows’ quicklaunch bar? He has me right there to tell him, I guess. Why spend 2 seconds scanning for a familiar icon, when he can just ask me to “open a browser”?
Stubbornness? Laziness?
Perhaps for him, “open a browser” means [Super], [F,I,R], [ENTER]; or perhaps it means [SUPER]+[R], [I,E], [DOWN], [ENTER]; or even [SUPER],[DOWN],[DOWN],[ENTER]. And on my machine, it’s simply *click* or [ALT]+[F2],[F,I,R,F],[ENTER].
For him, even on Windows, if you took away his run command or deleted his pinned start menu item, he might have to scroll painfully through his All Programs menu until he found it again.
If it wasn’t for start search on Vista, I know a few friend who would be pained to find anything on their PC.
My sister still doesn’t know how to use Start Search, and I have a friend with a Mac who doesn’t know how to use Spotlight.

Rather than find a new better way of doing things (like if I told her to just hit [SUPER] and then type what she wanted) she’d still go back to old habits, have trouble remembering the simplest things, and in his laziness or stubbornness stick with the slow inefficient method because it is what she knows.

tl;dr – Humans are lazy and stubborn. Not all of us, I use Linux and test alternatives. I don’t consider myself to be lazy and I’m human, so therefore I cannot hold all humans to be lazy and stubborn.
However I would guess a lot are, especially the “smart” ones. ;P

The problem is that the 5% remain huge because of lack of support and different/advanced ways to fix things. (Example even most Windows Power Users can live without messing with the registry but in Linux, most of the fixes can require knowledge of the Linux infrastructure.)

In the Windows world (and the Mac world as well) a few simple tweaks will get anything you need up and running.

Contrast that with Linux in that there is a defined structure that has been painted with broad strokes, but there are lots of missing links where Linux programmers are forced to program their own solutions & those solutions are not always 100% compatible with the solutions other programmers have come up with.

Face it, Josh, it's fun for non-Windows users to poke fun at Microsoft & the flaws of the Windows OS. Unfortunately, most of these non-Windows users haven't used a Windows computer in years & don't realize a lot of those flaws simply don't exist anymore.

I'm glad you have run every Windows & Linux program in existence so you are able to say that. No, seriously, you cannot possibly know if everything works faster on Linux than Windows. There's Windows software that there is no Linux equivalent for and vice versa. Blanket statements like yours above just cannot be made.

Really if everything works on your Linux, it works and installs faster on Linux than on Windows.

But if both software are available on both OS and both software are stable on them, do you really think something that's on Fluxbox or XFCE or even Gnome is in general going to be slower than one on XP or 7?

Besides that, I wasn't talking about speed.

I was talking about the lack of installation due to pre-installation.

Because of the Linux model, if distroes want to have certain software installed alongside the OS, then the newbie has it as soon as they install the OS on their PC.

Okay, I misunderstood the point you were trying to make. Yes, things are great if your distro has the software you want in their repository. If not, I've seen enough stories, even recently, of having to install dependencies and dependencies for those dependencies that the process is nothing a newbie is going to want to deal with.

Linux is getting better, but it still hasn't reached the ease of next-next-next-finish install wizards on Windows. I'm really looking forward to that day but we just aren't there yet in spite of wishful thinking to the contrary.

And this is what is keeping Linux from ever becoming a threat to Microsoft. Nobody wants to find out they can't run Program A just because they already installed Program B. On Windows you can run any program alongside any other & 99% of the time there will be no conflicts.