Quote - Not supporting OpenGL out of the box is a bad move however. And I'm fairly sure MS will fix that soon. Many popular games are developed as cross-platform, and those games invariably use OpenGL - and an operating system that can't run those games is not going to sell very well.

I agree with most of what you said, but i will just point out that MS froze OpenGL support long back. The last OpenGL lib MS released is at v1.1. Everything after that (current OGL version is at 2.x) is not from MS, but from display card chip vendors, mainly nVIDIA and ATI. This is very different from DX, where MS provide the libs and the display cards support those libs... In OGL's case, the card vendors have to code and provide the libs themselves. This is true even for XP.

This is also the main reason why there are so many issues with pro OGL apps and some cards (like ATI) because they implement the OGL standard differently then nVIDIA and nVIDIA having more clout in the pro market with its quadro cards has more support from CG app vendors. This is again very different from DX. In a DX app/game, no matter what card you use as long as it supports a particular version of DX, you will get all the features of that DX version. There may be performance differences of course, but never feature differences. In OGL however it is common to have some cards supporting some features while others support others (the so called OGL extensions) All due to there not being one standard implementation of OGL like there is for DX.

One benefit of this though is that MS cant stop OGL from being supported under Vista, since they have nothing to do with it in the first place. As long as nVIDIA or ATI release drivers that support OGL, games using it will run, regardless of OS.