Um, I'm much more a fan of freeware than shareware. Sure, Shareware is nice, like the UT2004 demo, but freeware, it just has so much more flexibility!

Anywho, part of the reason why I believe the author wasn't "wow'ed" was because of the fact that the Desktop Environment teams are trying to make their products as similar to other major desktop environments (Windows and OSX) so they can get people to move over and not be freaked out, like more people would if the default desktop manager were something like XFce, or even better yet, a window manager. If you want to be wow'ed by Linux, you'll have to open the hood. It might not look the prettiest when you pull it out of the box, but with a tweak here and a theme download there (Oh yeah, Windows requires what, a hacked utheme.dll, or something along the lines of that to get custom themes?) and viola, you have something that looks prettier than Windows, and well, I'll leave the comparison to OSX to the next guy.

Assuming that more programmers and companies begin to view Linux users more as legitimate people who have consiences, as opposed to us all being cold-hearted crackers who promote warez, then I think the playing field will be more even between Linux and Apple. Linux will always be a niche environment, much like Apple is. Although I'm a big fan of Linux, because Microsoft has managed to capture so much of the crowd that doesn't bother reading a simple manual, as well as much of the baby-boom, people become stubborn and refuse to change. I predict that Linux will grow with the newer generations and make a dent in Microsoft's Windows and Office incomes, but it will never become the number 1 environment.