You're right, Mac users do mention the BSOD sometimes. I only see it where there are hardware problems. OTOH, I think I might have preferred the old quick death of the BSOD to the slow, agonizing death full of false hope we get these days -- a system that gets more unstable and starts to grind to a halt as you try desperately to save your open files, often waiting minutes between mouse clicks to do it. I get this sometimes on XP and 2003.
That's because MS disabled it by default in XP. Those times that your computer does a spontaneous restart (you know what I'm talking about) you've just experienced a BSOD. MS changed the default way XP handles BSOD. Instead of halting the system and displaying the screen, it just restarts the computer. You can set it back to the old way. Go to Control Panels, System Properties, Advanced, Settings, and clear the checkbox under System Failure that reads: Automatically Restart.