Your description of windows only applies to XP. Now everything from printers to whatever is plug and play with Vista and 7.
What you describe would be the same thing as me saying that with Linux you have to do a rebuild whenever you want to install new hardware. The newer distros have pretty much eliminated that. So it is the same with Windows.
Well, it’s nice to hear that Windows has finally become easy to use. I’ll have to try Windows 7 when it comes out.