Some OEM's really fuck up Windows, leaving it in a practically unusable state almost out of the box with the amount of shitware that's on there.
Additionally, for Windows, some hardware vendors do a poor job of ensuring working drivers get installed by default. Sometimes the wrong, but similar driver gets installed by Windows on a fresh install and it can really bork things up. The same can happen on Linux, but it's easier to ignore a faulty driver at boot time with Grub and make sure the right one gets loaded. And truthfully I haven't had to do that since like 2005.