I agree with some of the points you bring up, I strongly disagree with the concept behind them.

I’m OK with e.g. an online service that I use but do not depend on to be in a constant state of development. We all used Gmail while in “beta” for years, for instance, forgiving a few hiccups every now and then. But that is one thing and an operating system being released unfinished from a development point of view is quite another. This is a piece of software I depend on for 12 hours every day. It has to be working flawlessly in order for everything else I use to be working well.

At this point in time Windows 11 still has a number of kinks that have to be ironed out in order for it to work flawlessly — and it did not have to be this way, there was no need to be rushed. More testing and polish would have resulted in a better product. Now all of that testing will be conveniently done by consumers. That’s not how a company like Microsoft should treat its products or us.

I even do not mind being promised features only for those to be added later, to be honest. These I do not consider a reason to say that an OS is “unfinished”. It’s a good thing to gradually add new functionality to it. But Windows 11 doesn’t just lack those. Even the UI, the most obvious new feature, is not implemented across the whole OS. There’s clearly work to be done on the core of it too since it was supposed to offer better performance than Windows 10 on the same hardware and it clearly doesn’t.

So yeah it’s a failure. It’s not that it did not deliver all of the features promised. It’s the fact that on a basic level there’s a lot of work to be done in order for Windows 11 to not be considered a “beta product”. Others may be OK with being beta testers for the newest OS of a 2-trillion-dollar company. Me, since resources are no object, I demand of that OS to be absolutely trouble-free and professionally developed. Windows 11 is neither.