I suppose I could run something else, but why? I don't really care that it runs Windows as long as it works, and from my quick playing, it runs StreetDeck decently. If they had masked the Windows startup screen and default login screen, one would have a hard time even really seeing Windows under the hood.

For CarPC use like this, Windows has most of the focus for developers. I had considered a Mac for a while, but the OS X attempts for this are much more rough, and really have no navigation functionality.

Startup times from standby seem to be right about 4 seconds. Haven't tried hibernate startup time yet. The BIOS is really customized, all that shows up on boot prior to the OS taking over is a green hour glass that says "Starting up", and is visible for about a second. The hardware is set to put the OS in standby mode when the accessory line loses power, then 72 hours later the system will hibernate. It also monitors the car voltage, so if it starts dipping to a bad level, it will put the system into hibernate mode before the 72 hour timer runs out.