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Server Core doesn't include a full DE.

It doesn't involve the desktop environment unless you ask it to, and you can invoke it remotely from outside. The system does boot to GUI, but the overhead of that with nobody logged in is not very large.

Embedded Windows, on the other hand, is forever the poor relation.

Still no alt+F1 to alt+F7, right? That would be cool to have. I'm really curious, as I made the leap to Ubuntu years ago and the most I've touched windows is doing reinstalls on friends computers.

It's true, but you can log in multiple users, or log in users multiple times, and these run in distinct areas, kind of like virtual terminals. These are called "sessions." http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2007/07/24/sessio...

If you've SSH'd into your Windows machine, as it seems Microsoft is working towards, you would not need to interact with the desktop environment.