Unless I wanted to live inside Win98 full-time and put up with incessant crashes and crappy multitasking. Thanks for the nice overview, Jonathan. I find little to disagree with here. Much of W2k functionality is stuff that would have been nice in NT4, especially the less frequent reboot requirement. Whatever, I've always thought the Windows reboots excessive and annoying in the extreme, so was pleased to see most such situations vanish.
Subjective speed is a funny thing.
It was all a perceptual trick of how the splash screens came and how boot progress was indicated. Then in the desktop, the default setting for unrolling menu made overall system response seem sluggish, even when in actual fact the click to action time was often faster than NT4. I mean, I've run it, and I like many parts of it. The parts I dislike are fortunately configurable and can be made to go away, once you find the dialogs for the relevant settings. It's rather like the situation with the Office package.