Exactly. Every new windows system takes me about 2 days to set up. Every default seems to be wrong, so I spend so much time rediscovering how to change it again.
On Mac I'm set up in an hour or two. Either the default is right, quick to change, or too much trouble to change to be worth the bother.
Not to be the Linux fanboy, but with Ubuntu, I am usually set up in 20 minutes and up-to-date in 30, if the bandwidth is nice.
I am considering building a metapackage just for me, rbanffy-desktop, to set up eveything on my box automagically upon invoking "aptitude install rbanffy-desktop" (or selecting it from the GUI installer). That way I would be up and running before I am back from lunch. Maybe I will need two, rbanffy-repos to set up 3rd party repos (VirtualBox, Skype, Google, PPAs) and one to do the heavy-lifting. Sounds like a good fun project.
Really? For me Linux takes days. Longer than Windows. Given that it's much more customizable than the other two I spend a lot of time setting up everything how I want.
You can tweak it for years if you want, but that doesn't mean you can't start working after a couple minutes. The point is a Windows box takes a full day to set up. You can somehow reduce that by slipstreaming SPs and fixes into the install disk, but keeping track of them and merging them into an install disk is a career in itself (one I would chose crime over)
On Mac I'm set up in an hour or two. Either the default is right, quick to change, or too much trouble to change to be worth the bother.