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I've tried using MS-only products for about a year before surrendering and switching back to Google.
Bing, Outlook.com, Windows 8.1/Windows Phone 8, Office 2013, all that sorts of stuff. Did not work out, and the biggest complaints about IE are:
1) Website compatibility. For some reason IE 11 chooses legacy mode for many modern sites like endomondo.com etc. which disables features and breaks stuff. Additionally, MS tried to force developers to stop using IE versions when determining supported features, which broke browser detection on many sites, including Google, banking sites etc. Basically they told "sorry, we don't understand your browser type" and gave an HTML-only interface or even no access at all. This may be a webmaster problem, but MS should have at least provided an option to enable user-agent spoofing by default. Now you have to press F12 every time you open the same website because IE cannot remember previous compatibility settings. The only option is to force "compatibility mode" for sites which is IE6 quirks emulation - totally stupid.
2) Addons - IE does not support lightweight addons like Chrome or Firefox. Addons are DLLs which require browser restarts, can cause crashes and generally are developed by unknown companies. Chrome and Firefox provide tons of simple extensions like scrobbling plugins, stopping of Youtube autoplay etc. which are unavailable for IE. And most plugins are in the form of Javascript which means they could be audited.
Plugin development for IE is much more difficult than other browsers, period. This means many small, simple (but niche) addons will never be done because you have to learn a lot in order to create even a simplest plugin.
Also, IE's search feature is terrible compared to Firefox/Chrome/Opera. No keywords for search engines, no option for adding search engines besides http://www.iegallery.com/ (does not have search plugins for all websites).
3) Privacy - for some reason Chrome is considered to be worse than IE. However unlike Chrome or Firefox IE has non-existing cookie management. In Chrome or Firefox I can only enable cookies for a pre-approved site list, while IE's only option is to clear all cookies.
4) Features - for many features IE hasn't changed much since IE4. Bookmarks are still stored as *.url files (no duplicates, no sorting, no support for characters like *,/,:). No spellcheck. Bookmark sync only works with Windows 8.
5) Stability - even though IE11 is faster and more stable than IE7/8, it still locks up more frequently than Chrome (but uses less RAM).
6) Updates - IE is terribly slow to update (once every 2-3 years???). And still updates require a system restart!

The only noticeable improvement between IE11 and IE7 is with speed, rendering and standards support. This may be good enough to make IE bearable on public or company-owned computers, but is not sufficient to switch Firefox/Chrome users back to IE.

If Microsoft gave a shit it would be using Tor, or creating similar technology...or even just making their own OS less spyware.

Let me introduce you to In-Private Browsing and Anti-Tracking Lists

They do

They don't turn it on by default, and it's not as good as Adblock Plus or Adblock for Chrome (it cannot block ads embedded in flash, like Youtube video ads for example), but it can be set to block most static ads.

http://www.iegallery.com/en-US/trackingprotectionlists

Why doesn't anyone use these?
MS has given the ability to filter this stuff out already. Nobody looks though.

Yes, kinda: http://www.iegallery.com/en-us/trackingprotectionlists

What, like Opera? Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, speed dial, several other things that later browsers copied. Those only became features once someone created an extension for them in Firefox, right?

Have you looked at a vanilla install of Firefox? Compare that with Opera and the number of features in Firefox is pretty much approaching zero.

If the only thing you want to compare is plugins or add-ons, instead of actual browser features, then you should look at things like this, this, and this to avoid making yourself appear uninformed in the future.

Yeah, and good luck finding the Google search provider on the Microsoft site. You have to actually search for Google because it's not presented on the first page (or you have to scroll right for a bit to find one of them) then you have to pick one of these:
http://www.iegallery.com/en/addons/detail.aspx?id=813
http://www.iegallery.com/en/addons/detail.aspx?id=13555
Which one is valid? I assume it's the first one since it takes forever to load that page at times... and the lower id would make sense.

I also wonder if the "Bing Suggestions" button on IE registers an active hit.

Yeah, and good luck finding the Google search provider on the Microsoft site. You have to actually search for Google because it's not presented on the first page (or you have to scroll right for a bit to find one of them) then you have to pick one of these:
http://www.iegallery.com/en/addons/detail.aspx?id=813
http://www.iegallery.com/en/addons/detail.aspx?id=13555
Which one is valid? I assume it's the first one since it takes forever to load that page at times... and the lower id would make sense.

I also wonder if the "Bing Suggestions" button on IE registers an active hit.