Is any of you going to either listen or do some research?
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallels_Desktop_for_Mac
Especially take a good look at all the screenshots on the wikipedia page. They do run side by side (NOT dual boot), which does have something to do with the OS. Of course, it's mainly the achievement of the Parallels VM software that's just 100 times better than VMware or Microsoft's crap, but it also has a lot to do with integration with the windowing system.
If MinWin would have been, say, 1GB, then I would have found it reasonably understandable that Vista would be over four times as large (after all, it does have more functions than MinWin) but over 100 times as large..? I do not find that acceptable, no matter how much extra functionality Vista may have.
So, somehow, there's a difference between that and the Linux kernel being 3MB and a complete distro 200 times as large (one cd)?
Have you considered that it may not be all that difficult to get a kernel running with some threading and memory management? That you can do this in a few tenthousand lines of code, and you don't need any real resources? Of course, the Linux kernel also has quite a few drivers in it. But still, the majority of memory is wasted on the graphical parts. Hell, if you include two or three desktop backgrounds with your distribution, that's already the size of the kernel...
Apart from that I do think that Vista is a bloated piece of crap, but this is simply not an argument for that statement...
Edit: Oh, one more thing..
Easy question: You can run Word on a Mac.
Why would you want to do that anyway?
Because you're an average Joe user and you have succesfully been trained into thinking that you NEED Word to be able to read .doc files. Like Windows users think they NEED MS Paint to be able to open bitmap files. And because you need to use doc format or otherwise your manager or your secretary will not understand how to open the creepy files you e-mail to them.