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Part of the problem is that many state attorneys general smell blood when it comes to Microsoft.

If Gates and Co. decided to, and were successful at, intergrating Linux and Windows into one OS, then Redhat, Mandrake, SuSe, et. al. would be calling for more anti-trust action against them and there would be an army of state justice depts. more than willing to do so.

From a legal standpoint, Microsoft is screwed either way.

NT, Windows 2K and Windows XP are an attempt to evolve MS Windows from the old MS-DOS to a POSIX compliant operating system. Unix was the foundation of the POSIX standards. Linux being a clone of Unix already contains most of the POSIX standards. Even early advertising for NT billed it as "A better Unix than Unix."

Applications can be made to run on either platform. IBM developed their ViaVoice product on Linux and ported it to Windows. The open source project GIMP (photoshop like graphics editor) has a version that runs on Windows. Even Richard Stallman's Emacs editor runs on Windows.

I don't think the Linux community would worry or complain about a MS-Linux. Given Microsoft's track record with software quality the other distributions would still be better.

If Gates and Co. decided to, and were successful at, intergrating Linux and Windows into one OS, then Redhat, Mandrake, SuSe, et. al. would be calling for more anti-trust action against them and there would be an army of state justice depts. more than willing to do so

Actually Microsoft could not legally integrate the Linux kernel and Windows because of the license that Linux is released under. The GPL forbids outsiders from closing the source. Only a joint effort by every single person that contributes to a project released under the GPL can result in a relicensing of the code. To add more fuel to the fire, that relicensing isn't retroactive. All previous releases are still GPL'd therefore Microsoft would have to get a list of every single last person that put code into the official kernel distribution's core and bribe them to relicense. What they would end up getting at the most would be maybe bits and pieces of the kernel.

If Microsoft were to put any linux kernel code in Windows the entire Windows product would have to be released under the terms of the GPL. That is a requirement of the GPL, if you use any code from a product released under the GPL then you have to release your product under the GPL. The GPL simply put doesn't tolerate freeloaders. So RedHat, et al would go after Microsoft for a contract violation on behalf of the FSF, not anti-trust violation. It could also result in a criminal indictment of Microsoft officials for copyright infringement.