"In the mean time, I'd love to hear from any Windows user who feels that they are getting any sort of genuine advantage because they were moral and chose to pay for their copy of Windows."

I've never had any trouble with Genuine Advantage, never gained any particular benefit from it either. It runs as a plugin for IE and/or Firefox, takes a few seconds in the background to do whatever it does, and that's about it. No major issues or impact on my life, either pro or con.

I would point out that Microsoft have been using the system for many years, and this failure appears to have been out of the ordinary was fixed within hours. Shit happens. Doesn't quite seem to warrant hysteria to this degree, but hey, what do I know about operating systems? I use Windows, I must be some kind of uninformed eijit.