And let's not forget that it obsoletes otherwise perfectly good systems. I have a Dell Dimension from 1996 that runs Slack (with KDE no less) with 64MB RAM, a P-I, and two HDs: 1.5GB and 2.0GB.
No way you could run XP on that. If you're not doing heavy number crunching, this ssytem is still quite serviceable for doing most of what most people use PCs for anyway.