Let's be clear here ...
"Stuck" with the same OS for 20 years? Can anyone say "Unix"? Having the same OS for 20 years, or 10, or 5, isn't being "stuck" with anything. A properly designed OS, with an ey towards to the future, should be viable for far longer than Microsoft would have us believe.
XP less secure than Win 7? Well, given that Microsoft has not been investing anything in making XP more secure ... that's kind of a no-brainer.
But there isn't any reason why XP couldn't be as secure as Win 7, given the same emphasis in design and implementation. Other than increases in technology such as moving to 64bit, 128 bit, or dare I dream, 256 bit hardware could possibly justify a new OS. The GUI, the interface one uses, however, is NOT really part of the OS. That is a function of a much higher layer, the presentation layer: essentially an application which displays the various means of interacting with the OS. In fact, wasn't the name for that application the Presentation Manager in previous incarnations? What happens to your nice computer desktop if you terminate the process in task manager titled explorer.exe ... The OS hasn't been affected, but all those pretty little icons and such have gone away ... What Microsoft has been doing is to incrimentally fix the defects in their previous generation and slapping a new UI on it with more eye candy in order to get us to pay for security and stability which SHOULD have been present in the first place. Some years back it was documented that Microsoft could sell Windows for around $50 and still make a respectable profit. And Home Premium vs. Home Basic vs. Professional vs. Ultimate? All the same OS with the same cost. The difference is Microsoft *DISABLING* functionality for the "lesser" version. So, why should Pro cost $100 more than Home? Its called price gouging.
That to the side, the difference between Metro and the current interface? It isn't like you couldn't give Win 7 the "Metro" look by writing a new UI program, just like you say you can return to the "old" GUI on Win 8.
Why is it that XP with 1 gig of RAM is getting sluggish? Isn't it funny how you take a machine which has been running for a year or two and it now runs dramatically slower than it did when new? Or that by wiping the drive and reinstalling the software clean it suddenly starts performing like it did new? It seems that the "sluggishness" these non-new machines develop is actually a problem with the design of the OS, something the manufacturer should correct in their defective product rather than cajoling everyone into thinking they have to have a new OS. Let's separate the GUI from the OS in the discussion and talk apples to apples: the OS itself, not the dumbing down of the OS and/or the eye candy added on with which a company tries to drive sales.
