It's not my primary job responsibility, I'm a programmer, but I format and reinstall windows about twice a month on various pc's. Some with better hardware than others. It wasn't until 6 months or so ago that the windows 7 updates began to take an extremely long time. It happens without fail for me. It turned a lazy format + reinstall + patch, a half day, to over a day. If I forget to update the power settings before leaving for the night and the computer falls asleep, then add another day, because it takes forever for WU to even get a list of what updates the pc needs. I suspect those that don't have this problem really are just savvy about what manual updates need to be added first, and manage to navigate that path in an efficient manner. But it's clear by searching the internet that almost everyone is now having problems with win 7 updates when going from a clean install of win 7 sp1. Today a machine I just installed win 7 pro on basically took 6 hours and I ended up cancelling and looking for other methods. Finally I manually installed kb3138612, restarted, then did a search for updates and it found 229 updates in about 10 mins. None of the fix it tools or roll ups worked. I've now got a thumb drive with a few tools and updates at the ready.
I just find it funny the gurus insistence that MS is not responsible for this when there are hordes of people who used to have no difficulties running windows updates on clean win 7 installs, and all of a sudden right when MS is aggressively pushing their new OS, the old one gets extremely difficult to get patched. But to the gurus, occam's razor states that this problem is simply user error. yeah right. We can argue whether this is an passive or aggressive strategy by MS, but it's hard to argue there isn't an issue getting windows 7 installed and patched in a reasonably efficient amount of time, at least without having a manual update strategy mapped out.