Windows took the point of view of providing ABIs for both drivers and user space. This has resulted in some pretty awful growth in the Windows APIs, and meant MS took the blame for stability problems caused by buggy third party drivers.
However, what they gained from this is that when a piece of hardware doesn't work with Windows, most end users blame the hardware vendor, not MS.
Part of this was the OEM manipulation that the US DoJ eventually slapped them down for, but the after effect still remains in play: hardware vendors take on most of the obligation of making their stuff work with Windows, and MS make it as easy as they can for hardware vendors to provide binary drivers directly to end users.