It's glorious (lousy software continues to work while Microsoft is able to continue improving the OS) and terrible (software developers who are updating their software get shims applied and this complicates development, hides bugs, etc.
This is more commonly used for bug-for-bug backwards compatibility: if there's a a third-party application that was incorrectly using some Windows API which has been fixed in a newer version, and the fix breaks the application, MS might shim that version of the application with a call to the older version of the function or even a new piece of code that emulates the desired behavior.
(Non-Windows users might recognize this as the same basic technical approach as LD_PRELOAD / DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES, or a little more generically, symbol versioning.)
Basically, Windows' value proposition is broad hardware and software compatibility, and it will bend over backwards to make that happen, despite a developer's best efforts.