Because a lot of people (pronounce "newbies") have just started to use a computer and it's rather easy that the pc where they started learning was running XP. If you want to give gnu/linux a chance to "charm" this users out of XP, you have to let them work with the PC in a WinXP fashion. That's the standar out-of-the-book answer for that cuestion. (I still think a fluxbox or a afterstep winmanager is nicer and better, not to mencion KDE or Gnome...)

This is just a windowmanager project, the rest of the linux os is the same. No new features like bsod in Linux, so it's a project to reproduce the look, not the feel.

Not a bad idea, but how about taking just the XP gui concept and make it a little better. I've been working on my job pc with XP for 3 months and I bet there are better ways to make some things (who the hell designed the new window style, It's horrible imho!), but others like the start menu that shows the more frecuently used apps are nice.