A lot of the things mentioned there are good reasons for a curated App Store approach. It's almost impossible to stop arbitrary programs from abusing features of the OS on which they run, unless you have control over which ban poorly behaving programs from ever reaching end users.

On the other hand, isn't Path's app distributed by a curated App Store?

I don't think anyone is saying it's a solution to all problems, just that it might be a problem to some problems.

Alternatively, you can think of it as a good argument for open source. Take abuse of the notification area, for example: in Ubuntu this was eliminated by modifying every package in the archive. That's something a system like Windows with closed components belonging to dozens of different manufactures can't really do.

wow, I (like many others, obviously) have experienced many of the things described in the msdn blog article you linked to, yet never really thought critically that those things don't have to be there!

Things are going to look different to me now when I'm on a windows machine.

Nice post, but putting shortcuts in Quick Launch bar seems pretty standard these days and I like it as long as the installer asks. Also, he mentions the fact a programmer would have to hard code the file path ... I don't see why they couldn't write an algorithm to discover it instead.

I suspect that the post's point is that many don't use an algorithm and cause problems for non-English installations of Windows.