Zer0,
I hear you on all points. But be careful wishing for Mac OS, they are now pushing updates without any input from the admins. Our Art/Photo departments are Mac and it is a problem for the person who cares for those machines.
LTSC has been a huge labor saver for me, and I truly hope they will reconsider only distributing through 5 vendors and let us go back to downloading it from our accounts like the other operating systems. Education is another perfect example of why this distribution should exist, we need stability, and releasing feature updates in the middle of the semesters is not very nice. And not all of us can afford (cost or time) to run SCCM (or whatever they are calling it now). I may need to go back and use a WSUS server so I might have a little control, but that means more time to go in and approve updates, etc.
That said, I'm going to have to go through and build images of Enterprise for my computers and hope that a change happens and I can roll out the newer LTSC instead.