I worked for a company that was building a low-latency real-time platform for applications like financial trading. We shipped on both Linux and Windows. As I recall, our latency on Linux was fairly reliably under 1 ms, while on Windows it was often more like 15ms. In short, the Windows scheduler was nowhere near adequate for real time work.
One point I would make is that being a Linux developer is harder than being a Windows developer. Giving Developers neat new tools to expedite development is something Microsoft does well.<p>So while the figure about them being paid more is probably true the Skill Level-To-Pay ratio is probably more attractive on the Windows side.