From what I have seen, this is driven as much or more from the hardware side as from Microsoft. They want to be able to keep offering larger drive capacities and the old format limits them. If you noticed in the article, they will work with XP, albeit slower on the writes. I’m not sure the older versions of the other OS will have the option. They may have to upgrade. At least it is free with Linux.
You maybe right - but I don’t think Apple is going to let HW screw their loyal customer base by not providing an easy and expensive solution.
My point is that MS could do this as well with XP customers, but they are not doing it because they want to ‘motive’ their ‘customer/victim’ base to upgrade to Vista/Win 7 by coming up with some more money!