All excellent ideas. If you're a fairly experienced windows users, taken together the above will serve you fairly well. For the casual mom and pop user though, having to set up all that stuff just to be fairly safe on the internet can be pretty intimidating, (if they have any idea that any of it is necessary at all). Personally, I think windows is far too hard to manage safely for the novice.
MACs are a great alternative, and not really much more expensive than a nicely loaded PC. I'd recommend Linux as well for many people who don't want to have to deal with all the above that you outlined. (Except patching of course, which is common to any complex OS like those mentioned). Like you, I could easily keep an MS-Windows based computer fairly safe on the internet, but, frankly the MS-Windows interface doesn't really suit the way I use a computer very well. I'd die without multiple desktops :-)
HAND!
thanks for the info - ping