Well, I am not sure it'd be painless to boot up a macOS machine or an Ubuntu desktop that hadn't been getting updates for months - probably not 4hr, but there'd be some annoyance.
Some anecdata: updating packages on Linux will finish in less than 20 minutes (given a high DL speed), no reboots inbetween, and afterwards you can keep working, unless you want to boot a newly installed Kernel.
The difference is that those will at most nag you, but unless you've been extremely thorough in disabling all of the automatic update machinery (which is almost malware-like in its persistence), on Windows it will come back with a vengeance.