I think that is partly in the same way roman numbers withstood the test of time: being well-known made them appear easier than they are. For example, one annoyance is the rule for what ends up in alt-tab. I work with XP at work and regularly cannot alt-tab to windows I alt-tabbed to seconds ago because they popped up some dialog (or is that only with alerts?)

The rule for what ends up in the task bar also is incomprehensible for mortals. For awhile, every new release of Office managed to introduce a new variation (yes, Word is MDI, but all its windows show up separately being one variation)

I guess that, if you ask users about these features, they will just say "yes, sometimes it does that".