So what? Is desktop computing all that matters? Networking, scientific computing, mobile telephone, don't they matter?

Unix was never meant for looking magic to clueless users; it was meant for programmers, i.e. for people who use the computer and not just some programs written by other people. And, in its realm, it has been brilliant! Not perfect, but very good!

By the way, here's a link to learn something more: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/

... except that they could and did. People were not lacking in imagination. A science fiction writer imagined the Internet-connected smart 'phone in 1976, and put it into a science fiction novel (calling it the "mini-sec") titled Imperial Earth. A decade before that, an engineer imagined windows, hypertext, the mouse, word processing, graphics, and video conferencing, and gave what was later called The Mother of All Demos in an ACM/IEEE conference in 1968.