MS has every incentive to ensure that their Operating systems get the best hardware and show they are the more stable and scalable.

I wouldn't trust an operating system company that runs a "server farm" where they have their own OS and competitors. Why would Microsoft run their competition on their own hardware & data centers? If Azure breaks off from MS and becomes an independent company, OS agnostic, then maybe they can win my trust back.

I like Azure & would only use it for MS based OS, DB etc. I would never run, nor would I recommend any other OS running on Azure, ever. There are other "server farm" vendors that I can choose from for non MS based cloud computing.

I don't think there's a single blue badge (old colloquialism for "Microsoft employee") that believes BSD and nix are "competitors". Why wouldn't Azure run other OSes? It's not a virtualized Windows hosting service, it's a virtualized OS hosting service.

Agreed on other points made on this thread regarding pricing, though.

Because it's a commoditized market. MS knows damn well that if Linux, etc were shown to be significantly slower on Hyper-V/Azure than on other platforms, they wouldn't get subscribers. Bang for the buck is an important factor in business decisions, and there are a ton of other providers out there to keep MS honest.