Windows Update is just dogslow and forces a reboot. For me even a significant distro update takes much less time and it doesn't force you to reboot (nor to update for that matter).
I don't have to reboot after an update very often, almost never really. It's kernel updates where I have to reboot, other stuff I can restart and avoid it that way if I still want to keep the pc on.
I know on some systems hibernation (suspend-to-disk) can be fiddly. For me it worked out of the box which was nice.