OP here (disclaimer, I work for Microsoft, but I'm a Linux and Mac guy on the Azure team). Yes, it really has. Originally many things didn't work, node, redis, others wouldn't even run. Now I can't find anything that won't run at all and my only complaint overall is that disk IO is a little slower than on the Windows side of things. Overall it's really nice. Zero changes to my Ubuntu dotfiles.
Look at the cousin post to yours in this thread. As is often the case, the use-cases of the programmers are quite different from the use cases of many other users, but the system is optimized only for the programmer's use cases.
My machine only crashes maybe once every other week now. Mostly when I'm copying files in/out of the WSL filesystem, or doing any disk intensive tasks, such as npm install.
I do all my work in vim/tmux, and I run that inside of XFCE terminal running in WSL, connected to Xming. So all and all, it's better than Cygwin but I'd much rather use a Mac or Linux/BSD.
It's also quite special as it needs raw socket access (doesn't it work in connect() mode though?), it is on the backlog though as I understand.
Other things that won't work are fuse and VPN's and loading arbitrary kernel drivers (it's surprising how many people don't seem to get that it only implements userland compatibility)
