Sorry to disappoint you, but they *did* care. Problem is, they lost the touch with their "customers" needs and tried to enforce their own views of what is best. Just like M$ today.
Ehm like Stalin perhaps? Who killed 7 million people on Ukraine because of starvation and 1.8 milion people by forcing them to work?

They *think* they care, but in fact they live so isolated lives at their campus that they lost the ties to the real life. They just don't comprehend how one could *not* have 3Gb RAM and a broadband Internet.
I think they are pretty aware of that. It is all about money. I was thinking more about customer support. personaly I don't see any reason for switching to a never system (from Xp to Vista for me) if everything is working perfectly fine. No switch - no need to buy a new hardware

Even the Windows XP (2001) which is used today on most of the machines needs *twice* as much resources to run the same tasks smoothly than the much newer Linuxes (2005-2006) do.
I am not Linux expert however when I run Fedora Core 3 I couldn't see any difference in running speed.
But Vista is reported to be much, much worse. The gargantuan system requirements and DRM complexities will sink this Titanic sooner or later - see the harrowing stories at http://badvista.fsf.org/ . Many customers prefer to stick to the old good XP, others get fed with ms and move to Ubuntu.
Yeah, but is there any reason for switching to Vista?

So, in this perspective FPC is the best.
Depends what do you want to do. Maybe I am strange but I love Delphi's IDE and I love Delphi's Debugger Of course when it comes to crossplatforming FPC is a must, but still firstly I would develop my application in Delphi and then port it to FPC.