Fervor from the medias yes. But from the people? Did people really line up to buy an Operating System? At the time of the release it is not like there was a lot of software ready for it anyway. I remember our first pc with Windows 95, we only used it for browsing, most of the time we would boot to DOS to play games and make music with Fast Tracker 2 and Impulse Tracker. I think we were even preferring a DOS CD player to play music because it had lots of fancy graphics effects reacting to music. Can't remember the name of the player.

It is only during the win98 era that we really started to use windows apps on our family computer and even then it didn't last long for me as on a pentium 90 overclocked at 100Mhz it was slower and less productive than using a Linux distribution.