For the user experience level they were designing towards, workspaces would have been a recipe for "I broke my computer, all my work is gone" support calls on a

For the user experience level they were designing towards, workspaces would have been a recipe for "I broke my computer, all my work is gone" support calls on a constant basis. For users that can't grasp that minimized windows become icons on their desktop or that directories can themselves contain directories, having everything switch to a new workspace will look to them identically to either one of an "I just broke it" or "It just deleted/erased/destroyed everything I was working on" result (and which result occurs depends upon whether they blame themselves or the machine as the cause). Sadly, the result is that us advanced users, who do understand workspaces and can make productive use of them, were left without them being available until win10.