This is a very well thought out response, and I do not directly disagree with much that you said.
MS Company: Dubious ethically at best. I think there is more to the argument ~philosophically though. You have to have the fundamental opinion that Open or/and Free software is good, not that this is wrong, but coming from somebody who has already embraced it we cannot have a unbiased opinion, that is to say the judge and the advocate are the same. You can come at this from all kinds of angles, how to be successfully operate a company in a capitalist way (e.g. legal requirement to maximize profits if you are a CEO in the U.S.). One could go on forever about that kind of stuff though, ethics can be interpreted like fashion.
MS Command Prompt: Hilariously bad! Indeed. But PowerShell is them recognizing that we can't have generations of point and clickers and call them Sys. Admins. Having no crossover is a little iffy, for instance the design team did what MS tends to do, ~copy others. The designer (ref: Windows PowerShell in Action Second Edition) said flat out they took a ton of lessons learned from the unix-like operating systems. Here's an example that you may see some similarity:
Linux today: I go back around once every so often and I don't disagree with your comments about the installers either! But I would have full on nightmares about trying to manage this in a business environment without Group Policy, compatibility with most software out there, etc. Users don't know, and they don't want to know. This will surely become less of an issue though once almost all services are hosted instead of internally operated by their IT departments. Then we can talk Linux because I'll hop over the fence to you guys!
I won't pretend to know how Linux works in a business setting, but right now I can take an installer and deploy it to 1000 machines (Group Policy, System Center, one of dozens of third party utilities) in about 20 minutes and have very little if any problems, and lets say after that deployment the installer is for an online service, then I'll make sure settings do not get changed with Group Policy, then integrate the Authentication with a third party using Active Directory which gives these 1000 users accounts automatically without ever having to leave my desk. I am happy with that result!
Windows 2012: I just fixed a problem with Windows 2012 that had my iscsi connection dropping out of nowhere when backups ran, so I feel your pain on that and I cannot deny the problems fundamentally with the OS. The capabilities and speed at which you can work are really what I was pointing to in normal situations. If I had a cleanly installed OS I could make it a hyper-visor, file share, setup file replication to another share, connect to an iSCSI SAN, setup High Availability with another server with a technical face roll on my keyboard inside an ~hour.
Thanks for the response!