Fair enough, still seems silly as hell to me. Windows is perfectly functional for corporate, and even software development use as long as the team managing the image and standard settings at your workplace is competent.

Yeah, being able to customize everything to meet your preferred workflow etc with Linux is preferable.

Gmail is functional at what it sets out to do

it is not. it can't even do such simple thing as sorting the inbox by the sender's name. it may seem functional to people who never used real mail client and were brainwashed into accepting this as the only available ui, but it is really not.