In defense of Windows, I'm not sure consistency is as important as usability. We humans aren't very consistent, as a rule. Consistency, rather than being our natural state, takes some effort. Do I care about button placement, or labeling, or do I care about having things right where I need them when I need them? More to the point, as Windows evolves, inconsistencies may be deliberately introduced for user experience sake. If you "focus group" a particular portion of functionality with a significant enough participant size, you'll probably find over time, that what they liked last year, they didn't like this year, but at the same time, people like familiarity, so maybe windows lets you access something the new way and the old way (control panel classic view comes to mind, as well as task viewer|details) As a large system grows with its users, if it's doing it properly I suspect it tends to create a very usable mess, as we are somewhat messy animals. But if it works organically with how we operate, that's really the ideal, no?** ** I'm not saying Microsoft always achieves that - hell Apple is probably better at that - but they both seem to have that goal at least.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.