These days yes that's mostly true. They've solved the DLL hell and they've gotten DirectX to coexist more peacefully with older versions. Most of my game related problems went bye bye when I ditched nVidia for AMD.
In terms of changes, they're removing the start menu completely based upon what they were told by people who don't care about their privacy. It's one thing to disable it by default and let people enable it if they want it, and another to take it away completely.
They did that with Ribbon, they infected Office with it and now it's spreading. I'm sure it works just fine for people that only want to use the functions that MS thinks you want to use, but it takes quite a bit longer to get to less used functions and I have yet to find any internal logic to where things are hidden.
I'll need to dig it up, but I remember seeing an article, by MS IIRC, explaining some changes they were making to Explorer. It pretty much made them look like incompetent wankers.
It's not just a resistance to change, it's that the main reason to keep using Windows is that you've learned the UI and it comes installed on your computer. If you have to learn a radically different UI either way, why bother. MS will just change it again next release anyways. I might as well just install Linux Mint o similar as it does the things that most people use their computer for just fine.
As much as I hate Apple, look at how they handle their OS. They made a major change in the early '80s with Lisa and the first MacOS, then they just tweaked it for the next like 15 or so odd years. They released OSX, and they've been tweaking it ever since. That's basically just 2 major overhauls or less than 1 per decade.
Microsoft is hardly the only one to make this mistake, but NFC, as awesome as it is in American football, is one of the stupidest ideas I've seen in a long time for computing. Bluetooth has become a bit of a headache security wise, but NFC is even worse.
Like I said, I can't really say that MS is any more wrong than everybody else that's doing this, but it's a solution in search of a problem. My old Nexus One could do a very similar thing with QR codes and the screen. It was wonderful in that it was a lot more secure, and still convenient.
I realize that RFID and similar have a sort of Wow effect, but they're terrible from a security stand point and ultimately the consumers pay more in order to be vulnerable.