The time to hack the Mac was 2 minutes... because that's how long it took to get the referees to navigate the computer to the pre-prepared website.
Charles Miler, the winner of the MacBook Air and $10,000 told interviewers that he, along with his team of two ex-NSA computer security experts, worked three weeks in advance of the CanSec West conference where the contest was held, to find the security hole in Mac OSX.
Vista was hacked six hours later but the team who did it had not done any advance preparation.
The LINUX laptop was not compromised, even on the third day of the contest.
I'll bet they disabled the Vista protected mode as well. They did not mention it in the article, but the fact is, the machine will not execute anything without permissions granted by the user. They would have had to enable remote operation to do that, so when you look at it from a fair perspective. All the tests were likely rigged.
As for linux, It would totally depend on how many and which extra apps you were running. Without those, Linux would be impenetrable. It is the extra bells and whistles that are exploited. Linux basically has none. The more complex Mac OS's become, the vulnerable they will be.
Customers eventually will cause all these extras to be installed, and there ya go......