I think the trade is not only privacy but complexity. If I have to be a full-time system administrator for my one machine or set of machines, it really takes a toll. I'd rather just hand that work to a conglomerate. Linux in theory could also do this, but nobody has nailed it yet. By far the best advances have been package managers and those are only a fractional solution. For a person who does not have hours to pour into study and slamming their head against a keyboard in despair when something inexplicable is off, it is really hard to recommend something as fragile as linux. And I don't mean fragile if you "know what you're doing," I mean fragile for someone who doesn't know what GRUB is, doesn't know what a kernel does, doesn't need to ever see a compilation flag, and suddenly they're exposed to all the above when an update goes sour. There are, of course, efforts to make things return to a graceful state gracefully, but until there's an off-the-shelf solution for "rescue my machine remotely" that can run through all phases of the boot process, I think most people are gonna want to use something where they can blame a vendor instead of their own ignorance or lack of time to bone up on a topic as nested as open-source operating systems.
