What do I want on my list? Hmm..
1) Something like the Linux start up, so, even if it did take longer, I know what the @#$#$#@ the OS is actually loading/doing during start up, and when/if something went wrong, didn't get detected, malfunctioned, etc.
2) Give me the option, during installation, of specifying that temp files, documents, user specific settings, and other **Critical** stuff be stored on a different partition from the OS, or better yet, as different fracking drive.
3) Do something halfway sane, like allowing those settings to be imported or detected and auto-imported, where possible, into the OS, if something goes horribly wrong, and I have to reinstall it.
Yeah, dumbing things down has been one of the most annoying problems with Windows since... probably 95. But, the other problem has always been not letting the end user have any damn control over how half the stuff installs in the first place, hiding configuration options, making it impossible to "correct" bad configurations if you mess up, and a host of other issues. When I put in XP, I made the mistake of "thinking" that it was like 98, and I could save documents where I wanted, make a few simple changes to the locations for certain other things, etc., and have a "small" OS partition. It took me less than a week to figure out that MS had made it nearly impossible to do that without breaking half the stuff I already had installed, including the OS, in some obscure ways, and I have been dealing with a partition that, even with documents moved, is probably 10-20GB "too small" for what it needs to do, and which the OS provides no way, other than a reinstall, to correct. A Reinstall which would mean reinstalling, reconfiguring, and rearranging "again", 100+ applications, a MySQL service, and more than a few other things that I really don't want to have to "fix". It would, quite frankly, be less of a waste of time, effort, and cost, to scrap the entire machine, and start over. And its the OS making it that way, for the most part.
But, what I expect to see is more dumbed down security, more restrictions on what I *can* configure, and more cases of MS thinking they know better than I do how to "configure" the OS to do the things I want. I would be... almost disappointed at this point if they didn't keep pulling that BS. lol