A very insightful article on Windows 7 ß:
http://xkcd.com/528/
Very true. Snap a new UI on the backend, remove some garbage which was taking up extra resources and you get -- Windows 7.
You know it's quite amazing if you look 8 years back. 8 years ago Win XP first came out. 8 years prior to that DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 came out.
Now 8 years after XP we get Windoze 7.