The Surface is a big step forward in terms of eliminating a lot of nuisances from the Windows experience but it also proves that the biggest nuisance of all is OEMs. Eliminating them also cuts out a lot of reasons for using Windows in the first place, like low-cost equipment. I agree it's a great product, but it's also great because of the tight integration you get with a unified hardware/OS vendor. Dell, HP and others don't have this luxury, so their experience is always second-rate.

Also "Linux on Windows" is a huge step forwards, but sheesh, it's still atrocious compared to proper native support. It's like a slick version of Cygwin. Remarkable but not a drop-in replacement for Linux.

You can compile GUI apps on macOS, but I've never needed to. The one app that depended on that was Wireshark, but I found a way to use tcpdump instead. It's mostly a non-issue.