Comment by bunderbunder

NT is engineered for a different category of servers, though - it's a workgroup server first (originally its chief competitor was NetWare), and a Web/Internet server second. That drives a different set of priorities.

For example, as someone elsewhere in the comments pointed out, NT does file access in a way that works very well when accessing network shares. That's a pretty core use case for Windows on business workstations, where it's common for people to store all the most important files they work with on a network share, for easier collaboration with other team members.