I'm struggling to think of any improvements since Win7. The only thing that might qualify is WSL, but that's still experimental and buggy (yes, I know some people have had success with it, anyway).

IIRC Win7 was the one that started installing most drivers without any user effort, which was really nice. It also bloated minimum disk size to many times that of XP (or a very full-fat Linux install, so the drivers can't be the reason, since that also includes tons of drivers) but if you had the space, it was worth the trade-off.