Besides performance loss and memory bloat, the lack of framebuffer memory preservation on Windows has forced some new extensions to have ugly semantics. See the vertex buffer object extension
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ARB/vertex_buffer_object.txt
for one example.
This is one more case in which the Windows people did the wrong thing, and an opportunity for other systems to be better.
Since I was part of that working group, I'd like to clarify why some of those decisions were made. In that case it wasn't just Windows "issues." The big problem was (and will continue to be) power managment events. As near as I could tell, the power management issue was felt across the board. Platforms were not at all consistent (even in the same high-level architecture or OS) WRT what happens to video memory when someone closes the lid on their laptop. On some systems it's kept, on some it's dumped but the driver has a change to back it up, and on others it's just dumped.
AFAIK, perhaps someone can correct me, XFree86 on Linux falls into the last category.
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