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Au contraire, there are approximately two million new pieces of malware written every year, essentially all of it is targetted at Windows. The very best anti-malware protection only rates a detection rate somewhere in the 90% range. This implies the creation 200,000 new pieces of undetectable malware for Windows every year. If Windows were indeed secure enough for most purposes, then there would be no point to all that malware-writing effort.

While some people are cautious enough to be able to avoid such malware, for non-expert people who use Windows in conjunction with the Internet (which is the majority of Windows users), eventually the chances are that their system will become compromised.

Of all of the non-expert home users of Windows of my acquaintance, who effectively had the task of looking after their own Windows systems, none of them managed to use Windows for more than a year at a time before their systems were compromised. Some of them have asked me to fix their Windows systems, and others just take their system to a computer store every so often and fork out money to have it "fixed".

Edited 2011-10-26 04:04 UTC

Most of which is delivered via very specific means, has very specific vectors for attack and most of which gets tripped up by simply not having write access to system files. Unless you're dealing with a lot of sensitive information, you don't even need the anti-* software. As a precaution, it's worth installing a couple twice a year, running a scan and then removing them (since most people still running XP probably don't have the most robust hardware), though.