I do, however, feel that ever shifting specifications of PC's has led us down a road of OS and driver bloat where a vast amount of the potential of the hardware at our fingertips is wasted just catering for all of the potential differences and trying to keep things stable.
As someone who uses those OSs and drivers, I can state with a good degree of certainty that this isn't true at all.
Yes, there is some overhead for any abstraction layer, like D3D, OpenGL, etc. But the abstraction is a very good thing, as it keeps games from doing the wrong thing. Look at GalCiv2. Here's a less-than-stable game as it is written. It "leaks" memory (or rather, keeps it around for longer than it absolutely needs to). Imagine what would happen to your system if it could treat video memory the same way? It would eventually hard-lock your system, forcing a reboot. Thanks to abstraction layers, that is unlikely.
Further, you're not losing that much in terms of performance. Sure, Windows takes up its share of memory, but when you're playing a game in full-screen mode, it's not using much CPU time. And it will gladly page out much of its memory to the hard drive if you need more room. So it's not so big of a deal ultimately.
Okay, maybe Frogboy is the only exception where he can play galciv 2 on his bed, but majority of people i know would never ever play something like an RTS on your bed.
Not on my bed, but I'd definitely do it in my Lazyboy if I could. Unfortunately, a trackball is the best I can do from there, and it's not really a good RTS interface. I really need SC2 to support the Wii Remote
And I'm serious about that last part.
The nature of RTS will elicit too much adreanaline rush in you to allow you to be relaxing.
You say that as though console games are relaxing/braindead and only PC games provide real excitement. Errant nonsense.
The dumb and lazy folks here are the game developers who'd rather blame their customers and go to value-subtracted anti-piracy solutions than actually make games their customers can play.
OK, back the rhetoric up a sec.
Game
developers don't make choices about DRM solutions. They don't even make choices about what platform their games ship on. Those choices are made by game
publishers (some of whom are also developers).
Further, the increasing prevalence of DRM really has nothing to do with "blaming the customers" and has more to do with decreased caring about PC development. If you don't really care about your PC port, if it's only going to sell a fraction of what your non-PC versions will, why not drop some bad DRM on it? It's not like it'll make it sell significantly less, and it'll give those naughty pirates what for (for a couple of days till a crack is found).