Viro,
You make some excellent points. While I'm generally a fan of some of the *products* that come out of the open source movement (Linux is trez sweet for being free, Python is just fantastic, the Gimp, etc), I do not necessarily believe that the open source universe is the savior of computers and software everywhere. For the most part, open source products tend to be a generation.. in most cases, several generations... behind commercial software in polish, usability and "nice-ness".
Take the Windows GUI, Apple GUI and... oh... pretty much *any* free distro of *nux. I would consider it a pointless "debate" for anyone to suggest that anything from the free-world's X-11 offerings are "better" (meaning: more accpeted, user friendly and polished) than what Redmond and Cupertino offer. They simply aren't.
In terms of "hey, this works nice": Apple > Windows > free X11.
In terms of commercial acceptance: Windows > Apple > free X11.
The fight between Apple and Microsoft for "who has the better GUI?"... That's is simply a battle of money and marketing at this point. But the free X11 world simply isn't a contender.
Let me give you another real-world example that I recently came across.
My company, for reasons that are as yet unfathomable to me, develop all their enterprise wide systems in Perl with the occasional Java piece over a Sybase back end. They're a Sun shop. My team and I are a small, agile, hard-hitting team of quick-implementation, types. By career choices and timing, most of us are Microsoft based programmers; my focus being C# for over 3 years now. (
I've been there 6 years and still can't figure out why they hired me... Anyone hiring? 
)
I wrote a bunch of standardized, soap-based web services for an up and coming set of functionality that my team supports. Everyone was consuming it just fine... Except Perl callers. You see, there's a bug in Perl where they hard coded the names of XML namespaces in the Soap::Lite package. So, Perl is capable of consuming only a very limited subset of all the soap offerings out there and nearly nothing that microsoft's tools create. The Perl gangs all suggest you mangle your WSDL to "fix" the name spaces that the Microsoft tool kits create, even tho' *every* other Soap client out there works fine. Declarative name spaces are, after all, a known XML standard and *should* be universally implemented.
I say, "fix perl". The retort? you'll love this... I hear it all the time...
"It's open source. You can fix it if you want."
(sigh)
