I've thought about this a lot too and I mostly agree, but I think they'd keep the Windows branding and NT kernel and just start making the POSIX/Unix layer inst

I've thought about this a lot too and I mostly agree, but I think they'd keep the Windows branding and NT kernel and just start making the POSIX/Unix layer installed by default and supported as first-class. I'd love a Windows machine to work the same way I use my OSX machine: using Terminal.app and HomeBrew to develop and use unixey apps, but with a nice GUI and hardware support that's better than the Linux distros out there. I can confidently develop say, rails applications, test them locally, and just push them to production on Linux servers and I've never once thought "hey, I wonder if this will break due to differences in OSX to Linux." It just never has made a difference. I want windows to be like this too. I can get there with Windows now with Cygwin or SFU, but I want it all to ship with Windows, and binaries I create are unlikely to work anywhere except other people who have installed the whole stack. Plus there's no good terminal emulator for windows I'm aware of.