Well, one alternative for a non-techie would be Mac OS X. There's no product activation, no phoning home, nont of that hanky-panky. And with Boot Camp, you can create a Windows XP partition for playing your fave games. Since OS X is (as a net admin friend of mine put it) "a perfectly good distro of BSD Unix with graphic s**t all over it," you can easily run most Linux programs.

I'm OS agnostic, but I've helped a few people get on OS X in the last year. I think it's a better alternative for the non-hacker non-computer savvy person in your life. Windows can be great, but your have to know what you're doing, security-wise. OS X is much more forgiving of a n00b.