NTFS does supports journaling – as far as I can tell it's been there in Windows NT from the start, so XP would have been the first consumer version that offered it.

As for the shell, they did have a (barely) halfway decent clone of the OS/2 Workplace Shell in Windows 95, but by Windows 98 they had already screwed it up (trying to make a spatial file manager also be a browser) and every version since then has been a regression. :/