There's a lot of truth to that. A hardware manufacturer will provide a package that has both the driver and the utility. And quite often that utility provides a lot of garbage that just mucks up the system.
With Linux, the utility is generally provided by the distro and is much smaller.
The reason for this is that many manufacturer's software is driven by marketing: "Now with the Gunkulator 3000! A new tool to do what the old tool did! Buy some more of our stuff!"
Under Linux, the drivers are written (mostly) by the people that write the kernel. The utilities are written by the people that write the distribution. So you get a leaner, more efficient OS.
Microsoft has always let manufacturers provide drivers and utilities, many of which do horrendous things and violate basic security protocols. They decided to do something about this (theoretically) with Vista and only allow drivers that Microsoft has signed off on.
This hasn't been nearly as successful as hoped. Either you don't get drivers at all because either the manufacturer won't provide a driver or Microsoft won't sign off on it, or the company puts pressure on Microsoft to ship a faulty driver (Intel graphics chip) so they can sell their product.
So, while the theory is good, it really has ended up being just as bad as before as far as driver stability, or worse, with no driver at all.
A lot of the junk is advertising showing you all the cool features in that thing you just bought, stupid advertising since you already bought the product, but basically advertising. But it’s part of the Windows PC world, of course with harddrive space as cheap as it is I just delete the icons and don’t worry about the junk.
Vista and 2008 actually will let you install and use non-signed drivers. They just whine about it, and then only if you haven’t turned off some options and install the drivers the way Windows likes (through the “new hardware” dialog).