Letters to the Editor
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This is like the grand old days of IBM PC servers
They would take forever to start up, between the BIOS checks, RAM checks, device loading, then the OS...you could go out for quick sex while the machines booted. Their rationale, much like Porsche engineers rationale behind having a REALLY shitty linkage to first gear was, "You only need it once!"
Windows follows on this theory by assuming that everything is a customization that has to be loaded. And then behind the covers it kicks off a ton of services that few people ever need anyway. Now services don't take a great deal of time to start, they're services, that's what they do - start quickly. But the overall bag of crap you have drag around does tend to make it sluggish. So I guess the theory is you should never have to start the machine that often. I know I generally run XP desktops in the 200 hrs uptime range. Every 200 hrs or so, restart them to flush out the crap. 700 hrs uptime appears to be the max limit for being able to run a machine w/o having do crazy shit on its own.
Also never discount the incredible shittiness of Vista drivers. When they work at all they work poorly. Last but not least OSX is BSD/Mach/uKernel based. Starting up fast is one of its design points. Try as they might Windows will NEVER EVER EVER be a reliable SRT (soft real time) system kernel whereas BSD is.