In fact, most of the configurations are available in UI, but what makes *nix different is, it allows you to make it work the way you want(that's what /etc is for). On the other hand, I'm not happy with Windows until some registry tweaks are done and some useless services are turned off. On hardware compatibility, I don't think it's Linux' fault that some vendors don't publish hardware documentation. This should be considered before installing Linux at all.