That and mechanical hard drives saw a lot of longevity revolutions in the early 2000s. Last generation IDE and any SATA disk in my experience seem to handle many, many more power on cycles than older models. This was even before SMART, so I can't even test some of these disks for how error prone they are.
I'd say 95% of XP machines I've touched are SP3, and I've dealt with over a hundred of em. Even a few small businesses I've pressured to switch off XP were at least running SP3. IE6 is a much more prevalent issue on those older machines, where end users would ignore the popups and prompts from home pages and websites about how their browser is literally satan.
I agree about performance.. a fast machine around when the Core-2's came out is still pretty decent today with sufficient ram, which a lot of them even had.