at 45$ for an upgrade I'll check it out. Like someone posted 8 pages back it's not like you're being forced, come to think of it it's not like you could be forced.
http://www.techspot.com/news/44902-windows-xp-usage-finally-falls-below-50-mark.html
http://static.techspot.com/fileshost/newspics3/2011/operating_systems_july_2011.jpg
That was just last year, so up to last year (4 years after vista's launch and 2 years after windows 7's launch) XP was still represented 50% of all windows installs. Currently it still is the most widely used operating system in the world.
The comment for people moving to mac is laughable, Sure maybe a few percent, but more often than not if the new windows is bad, people simply refuse to move from the old one.
Think of it this way. Imagine if there were really only 3 different car companies. One had most of the market (read nearly all) the second had a small chunk (like 5-8%) and the last was struggling with the other two's leftovers (1-2%). Say the big guy released a bad model. Sure they lose out on sales for that model year, but you see only a small percentage of the consumers actually buy a new car at each launch, say like 10% will jump onto the new shiney (that's being very generous, in the case of cars it's actually closer to 1%). The rest take their time and only move when they're either forced or feel that their old model will no longer suffice.
Even a bumbled launch will still give most of that 10% to the big company simply because of brand recognition, even if familiarity isn't necessarily there in the lms. So we'll say that the second company has max 4% to gain from a bumbled big company launch, well 3.9%, that third company is going to get a bit of the action too.
If you take those numbers to the above chart and subtract 4% from windows and give it to mac... it's still an abysmal desktop market share.
You see APPLE is huge now because of mobile devices, not computers, and based on market share, most people walking around with iphones, go home to windows based pc.