I agree with you up to a point but given the hardware of the time, it was certainly possible to make the OS more robust than it was prior to the switch to NT everywhere, and to Microsoft's credit they did make the correct decision.
Now, despite the lingering snarkiness from the *nix-hipsters, Windows is incredibly robust... even more so today since in Vista and on even the graphics driver can crash without an OS restart in most cases.
True. The BSOD bloggers love to write about, for instance, was mainly caused by faulty hardware or defective third-party drivers. The OS, conservatively, entered panic mode to prevent damage to data. Somehow it seems acceptable for a Unix kernel to panic on such conditions but when it happens to a machine running Windows, that must be because Micro$oft programmers are so stoopid...
Now, despite the lingering snarkiness from the *nix-hipsters, Windows is incredibly robust... even more so today since in Vista and on even the graphics driver can crash without an OS restart in most cases.