Very true. And one can see some of that influence appearing in some
of MS' products.

One of the biggest complaints I read about in various forums is that
people cannot click on "Documents and Settings" in Vista. Those
complaints tell me those people haven't bothered learning Vista whose
directory hierarchy is more-closer to Linux/UNIX. As an example, all
the stuff that was under "Documents and Settings" and elsewhere in XP
and prior Windows releases is now under C:\Users\%username% which is
akin to Linux's /home/username

For the curious, Vista's "Documents and Settings" is a junction which
is akin (for a program, not a user) to a Linux symbolic link.

Though dot files (e.g., .bashrc, .profile, etc.) don't exist as such
in Windows, their counterparts do (in Vista).

There's even an etc directory containing the hosts, networks, protocol
and services files (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc).

And Vista (and Server 2008) are modular; I even created a Live CD for
use fixing other Windows systems and is what I recently used to
upgrade my work XP laptop's hard drive.