Without wanting to gush too much, but NT is a wonderful piece of technology. It's orders of magnitude better than anything else on the market without a doubt for any application.
The bit people have the "hate problem" with is the Win32 subsystem that is chucked on top of it.
My only regret is that Microsoft didn't open the subsystem API enough. I submit they want to keep some freedom in this area.
The lack of real-time handling probably won't have much impact on the phone platform, since users (the primary interface consumers of the OS) don't operate anywhere near "real-time" anyway.