I won’t argue with you 7200rpm is better. In the real world most computer users won’t know or see the difference between 5400 and 7200 because their computers run slow for other reasons. Such as not reloading an OS for years and years. Or like my nephew who called complaining about slow internet at college. Turns out he had not rebooted his laptop for weeks..... So Firefox had turned into a memory hog. I showed him how to just reboot Firefox and that solved the problem. But how many other operate like this for years?
You sure got THAT right. Windows can get MIGHTY stale and slow after even six months, depending on what you do with it. Mac OS-X, not so bad although somewhat. Linux/Unix, I don't see much slowdown even after a few years.
That's a Windows thing. I had a Mac for three years, upgraded in place from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, and it got faster over the years. I finally had to reinstall because of a dead hard drive, took me only a few hours to have the computer exactly back to where it was with all accounts, and most of that time was Time Machine restoring a couple hundred GB of data from the backup. If I'd told it to, it also would have restored all of my applications.
So, the time question. Over the course of a few years you can be reinstalling Windows a few times, and each time taking maybe a day to set everything back, including reinstalling all your programs. Or you can just get a Mac, never worry about the annual reinstall, and when you do have to, it's push a button, walk away, and everything is back to where it was before.