Windows Server has a ton of features not present in the desktop versions. For example IIS running on a Windows 7 desktop is capped at 10 concurrent connections

Windows Server has a ton of features not present in the desktop versions. For example IIS running on a Windows 7 desktop is capped at 10 concurrent connections for licensing reasons. Whereas I could install a desktop distro + apache on my server and serve as many requests as the hardware can physically handle. The only difference would be that default settings would probably not be well optimised for that use case, but some reconfiguration would solve that.