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Most Spam Comes From Just Six Botnets
Ezhenito noted some research pointing out the (maybe) surprising bit of research that 6 botnets are responsible for 85 percent of the world's spam. That seems a bit high to me, but the only aspect of spam I am an expert in is *getting* it.
Spam affects the little guy. Torrents affect (apparently) the big guy.
Tinfoil hat much Mr. 404? An AV product can't block every threat BECAUSE Windows is closed source? That makes no sense.
The reason that they can't block every threat is that they are still signature based and have not completed the move to behavior based blocking and heuristics. The other problem - the main one - that you don't even mention is users. If someone bothered to write a 'SomeFamousPersonNaked.exe' for other OS'es - stupid users would still run it. (I do note that in today's world, the average Linux user is brighter about these things than their Windows counterparts - mostly because Linux is still in that niche role where it is dominated by computer savvy folks at least for now).
But, give that same Windows user who is stupid enough to run that EXE an Ubuntu machine and send him a version that runs on Linux AND HE WILL STILL CLICK IT. Switching OS'es doesn't make a dork not a dork. Doesn't even really matter whether the user is an admin or not on Windows or Linux - just sending mail doesn't require it and now that Vista is actually usable by many people as a standard user the malware writers will adapt and not try to own the whole machine right away.
I can see how this will be a problem for Linux users in the future if the user base continues to grow into that "stupid user" segment - at which point folks will be more than happy to write bot software for those users to run.