Honestly, yeah. I did that with my laptop and it's a perfectly fine time now. I'm more offended that those things are on by default and that you have to undo half of the changes they make every update. It doesn't take a long time, and you can end up with things OK pretty easily, but it makes me feel slimy having to make those changes at all.
I musta missed a hell of an OS with Win7 but when I've touched it I haven't felt that way. To me, "regedit hax and uninstalling half the computer" has always been SOP for Windows. Granted, I use none of the stock OSX stuff either; I'd use Linux if I could get the programs I need to run on it. But as it is, nearly everything runs on Windows, what's left runs on OS X, and if it runs on Linux it's probably open-source freeware that works just well enough for people to pretend it's viable.