The issue isn’t a matter of killing the hardware any sooner but rather making it more usable during the hardware’s lifetime. If a bunch of automatically started disk-accessing processes fire off at once, even if they purportedly run only when the system is idle, it’s useless if the system becomes almost unresponsive. That’s what happened in my case: It took nearly a minute and a half for the screen to go from black to fully rendered. It’s like selling someone a car and telling them “Hey, the vehicle does self-maintenance. Isn’t that cool? Oh, by the way, if it’s doing maintenance on itself, there’s a possibility that you won’t be able to start it if the vehicle is parked, and if you’re driving, it may freeze up!”

When I tried an earlier release of Ubuntu (7.something, IIRC), I recall that they had several indexing services enabled by default. Since I had installed it on my laptop, I was pretty upset by that particular service running constantly from boot. Many mobile users complained about it and Canonical listened. The difference, of course, being that even if you didn’t know what was starting the service under Linux, you could terminate the process and go about your business of finding it later. With Windows, there’s too much black magic behind the scenes to know half of what’s going on anyway!