[haswell]

Why would you conclude that GNU/Linux is the inferior product here? The year was 2009, and the Linux ecosystem was in a very different place.

Technical chops and "the OS has such a poor set of build tools we need a specialist" are two very different things. If you follow this line of reasoning too far, it quickly descends into absurdity: "Buying an operating system just tells me the person didn't have the technical chops to write their own" is something that I'm fairly certain neither of would use as an argument.

If a product is "superior" but is so difficult to use that people abandon it, was it ever superior to begin with?