Yeah. It's come a long way, and if nothing else, Linux is a fertile playground for the philosophy of software design for those who handle the UX/UI stuff.

Windows 7 was beat to the punch by gnome/Ubuntu on the paradigm of representing apps in the taskbar as icons that then expand to become textual lists. Some people hate that idea, and that's ok too, so long as they're given alternatives that are easy to switch between.