The single most irritating part of windows admin, though, is that there is no good, natural way to make sure all user files end up on a network share. It's like "network" never happened for real in Redmond. I'd rather have a diskless workstation that swaps to NFS than that.
For a brief period Apple actually got this right. If you ran the server version of OS X it would add the appropriate things to DHCP so that when you were setting up a new machine it just
knew that it was part of the network setup and would automatically just do the right thing according to what the local network administrator had configured. Unfortunately Apple just seemed to lose interest in this, to the point that the current 'macOS Server' is just another application that misses most of the features that the pukka Server OS had.
Sometime around OS X 10.6 I had a server running OS X Server at home. I'd, with little effort, set it up so that: all accounts had home directories on the server, you could log onto your own account from any machine in the house, and on my notebook I had a copy of my home directory both on the notebook
and the server with automatic syncing between the two. Moreover, all the machines were automatically configured to run backups to network volumes. OS updates for client machines were cached on the server and you just ran any updates over the local network. You could netboot any system, even run diskless if you wanted, and you could run new installs over the network too. Add an account for a new machine to the server by ethernet address, pull it out of the wrapping, plug it in, hold the option and N keys while you turned it on and then go for a cup of coffee while the machine had the OS installed and was prepared for use - when you came back it was ready, fully configured, for the end user to log in for the first time.
You could even add Windows machines to the network with little effort (certainly less effort than fighting with Microsoft's
horrible AD admin tools); even Linux machines if you were up to manually configuring the Linux machine to talk LDAP/Kerberos for directory services.
If Apple had pushed their server stuff a bit more (it was virtually a secret) they could and should have taken over the world with it. Admin-ing an Apple Server network was a breeze compared to any of the alternatives.