Windows 7 has so many regressions that only Windows 8 rivals that. One of the more annoying things in Windows 7 is that they didn’t seem to make up their mind about what type of UI they want – some parts use the Vista “I want to be a web page” look, some things are a bunch of icons like in XP, other things are old style win-forms dialogs. Some things are all of these at once (like the start menu), and you never know what you’re going to get until you got there.

Also folders and network access don’t work like you might expect them to (what are “libraries”? what is “Network Neighborhood”?). Even the task bar behaves differently then before (though I would tend to say that that is a good thing they stole from Apple).

I would tend to agree that GNOME Shell’s usability rivals that of Windows 7 (with being very bad, that is), but KDE4 is just fine (better then fine) and Unity isn’t that bad either.