Win95 was essentially a graphical shell running on DOS. So you were bastardizing the system back down to the underlying "kernel", really just a program loader (not even really a resource manager -- after all, DOS can be convinced to load Linux via LOADLIN.EXE...which by one interpretation makes Linux just another DOS app ;-). Whereas with the NT kernel, you're talking about a system which was pretty much ground-up designed to be a GUI system. Yes, you can hack it into running console mode. I'm even largely doing this presently by accessing a Win2K system via SSHD. But it's a gawdawfully fscked up command-line space. The native tools suck, the filesystem layout's a beast, there's no consistency. Or put more succinctly: it's Windows.