Considering we are in a Mac forum there is no way XP will be seen in a positive manner. I run 3 XP boxes in my house and only had blue screens when my box had a piece of ram go bad and only had a few lockups since then, mostly from 3rd party apps.
Funny thing that hasn't been mentioned is XP was designed to run on about anything that met the specs and considering the hardware out there people; those are big shoes to fill. You have several different types of CPU's, thousands of drivers for add-on cards ranging from SCSI controllers to 9600 baud modems. I can load XP onto my 333 MHz P2 from 8 years ago and not have a problem, it might be slow but it would work. Now OSX is touchy, it has a limited window of hardware it will install onto, no concern for backwards compatibility leaving a lot of Mac users high and dry. When an OS is designed for certain hardware specifications rather than for a wide array, then you will have differences no matter what.
One thing people tend to overlook is most systems shipped from the factory with an OS on it is going to be faulty. No it isn't MS's fault but the installers. Most OS's on factory systems are loaded by images from central servers and these images can be corrupt and they might make it onto a thousand systems before detected. The image might be for the same model but the system might have revised hardware in it. This could create crashes later on and the unknowing user might not see the mistakes until they show their ugly head.
Now OSX doesn't have these big shoes to fill since apple limited its hardware to anything older than 3 years and only a limited amount of processor types. XP needs to be maintained by the user, its not a "forget and go" type of operating system. The large amount of "system" programs can create instabilities too, such as anti-virus software, firewalls, pop-up blockers, and so forth.
I always thought comparing the 2 were like comparing apples and oranges. XP was designed for such a broad range of chips and hardware and stability took a few point loss and OSX was designed to be used on such a narrow range of hardware (i.e. anything newer than 2000 and is apple) that stability was there however this also left millions of customers forced to buy new systems to take advantage of the new OS and its features. A point lost in marketing and ignorance is Mac and PC's are not going to replace each other. Some might think so but they both have their ups and downs and both will always be better than the other somewhere.
Bottom line? If XP crashes for you too much, quit complaining and learn Linux. If OSX has too many kernel panics, quit complaining and learn Linux. (I hate Linux
) Sorry for the partial off-topic ramble but I needed to say it.
P.S. If you hate something enough, you will do things to cause it to error. One thing I noticed with local Mac users that also have MS boxes. They would neglect their XP box and then talk about how bad of an OS it is. All OS's need to be tweaked and refined to get it to run smooth. You can't just install XP and expect it to be error free, same with OSX. Is this the case on this forum?
