It doesn't involve the desktop environment unless you ask it to, and you can invoke it remotely from outside. The system does boot to GUI, but the overhead of that with nobody logged in is not very large.
Embedded Windows, on the other hand, is forever the poor relation.
Still no alt+F1 to alt+F7, right? That would be cool to have. I'm really curious, as I made the leap to Ubuntu years ago and the most I've touched windows is doing reinstalls on friends computers.
Embedded Windows, on the other hand, is forever the poor relation.