As someone who used to get paid to find bugs in low-level windows software, I must emphatically disagree.
At least on the hardware side of things (USB stack, included hardware drivers, etc.), the quality is really quite poor compared to the Linux equivalents. I can't speak to the quality of the OS X equivalents.
...wow.
Please re-read my comment. I simply said that Linux drivers tend to be better constructed than Windows drivers. That doesn't imply that Linux drivers are particularly good.
I'll say without too much conviction that the best drivers I've seen have come from the BSD family, but I don't have a lot of experience there.
I'm praying for the light of gaben to descend upon the driver ecosystem and make *nix gaming a thing.