[badass]

Looks like you both missed the point. Those are both over 10 year old OS's.
What were other OS's doing 10 years ago? Windows 98.
That was a piece of Macos 9?
That was also
In fact the last real Amiga and ST OS's were both written in 1992. The age of Windows 3.1
I said in my previous post:

OS's like STOS for the Atari ST (spit*) and Workbench for the Amiga were good desktop OS's (for the time)
Things have moved on now, however that doesn't mean that any current easily available OS is actually that good at what it is sold to you to do.

Before anyone starts pointing how these old OS's lacked things like multi user capability, file system security, process isolation etc, please re read my post. That is all irrelevant at that time due to hardware available and what people used to use their computers for.

Just to clarify further: Workbench 3.1 is rubbish compared to Vista. or XP, or OSX. However they have had another 15 years to get better. In fact Windows 2000 was far better than Workbench 3.1
NT4.0 was certainly not a better desktop OS, Nor Was Windows 98SE.
Has Windows or any other OS booted from pressing the power button in under 6 seconds
Thats what my Amiga used to do. Admittedly part of that is because it's version of BIOS was over and done with in less than a second, so lets say that leaves 5 seconds for loading.
A modern HDD can sustain anything from 60-120 MB/sec. That's enough for 300-600MB of data. Forget access time. It's possible for a properly designed OS to load all 600 MB to memory in one continuous lump, then use the RAM for random access.
Vista rearranges its boot files on the HDD every 3 days. It knows exactily what data was requested last boot and uses this to reorder the data. I have 8 GB RAM. Why can't it put all of the data needed to get me to the desktop in one contiguous block at the edge of my HDD? I have a quad core CPU.

I predict a whole load of excuses as to why this is impossible for a modern operating system to do, but all it requires is a little thinking out of the box.