Audio is what we're discussing here. Not sure why you would want to separate that. It becomes a strawman. The inability to not open up and fix/replace/upgrade hardware is absolutely a valid concern, but one that has proven inconsequential to me across two MacBook Pros, and a Mac Mini. The only thing I've ever had to do was upgrade the RAM in my Mac Mini, which was an incredibly straight forward process with zero complications after the installation. Other than that the thought of opening one up to do work on it never crossed my mind because it was never a necessity. The three PCs I had before that were a different story. They weren't bad, just problematic. Well... This Dell PC I had was absolutely awful, but I blame Dell's crappy built-in infrastructure rather than the actual hardware for that one. Also, who's fighting?
This is an interesting point. It's cool to see that Windows 10 is doing this work for people to eliminate some of the confusion as to why a piece of hardware may not work immediately. That said, the reason I still prefer Apple on this front is that in most cases there's no driver required regardless of how it's installed (i.e. actively by the user, or in the background by the OS). As an example, Mackie drivers are notoriously bad on Windows systems. Mackie has even admitted this publicly. Their products require zero additional software to function properly on a Mac. I've had a couple of their interfaces (I still have a Blackbird, which is fabulous aside from the DA side being a little brighter than the source), and it was always literally a case of connecting a FireWire cable and you're done. On a Windows based machine a driver gets installed by the user or by the OS, and historically between Windows and Mackie, it's a gamble as to how well it's going to work, stability, crashes, etc.
Additionally, a lot of companies are moving their driver packages onto their website. Say you get a new device, hook it up and it doesn't work. The device predates Windows 10 and the OS can't find the correct driver online automatically. You fumble around with it, get frustrated, and then finally find a reference in the manual to the driver package you have to download and install. So you download it and manually install the driver. You're up and running. Great. What if it's a legacy product and the driver is nowhere to be found? You're toast. In a lot of cases you now have unusable, or at least unstable hardware.
Definitely a step in the right direction for Windows, but it becomes apples to oranges when you consider that they're streamlining a process that isn't needed by their competitor. I know I'm coming off as a shill for Apple, but when you get away from having specs control your purchasing decision, there are a lot of very good reasons for using Apple rather than Windows. I should mention that I use a Windows-based system at my office everyday in a pretty high capacity, so I'm no stranger to getting good results from it.
