It doesn't matter if Microsoft is really big on typography if it looks like garbage on Windows. I agree with the OP; most open fonts look absolutely horrible on Windows.
This is exactly what I mean, also, if you try to make them look better with that lousy truetype wizard, it tries to make you choose what looks better without any context, and if you pick some wrong choices you fuck up the whole font rendering in the OS, and there is no clear way to revert to defaults... nasty experience nonetheless