Vitel said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux
"This article is about operating systems that use the Linux kernel. For the kernel itself, see Linux kernel."
Most of the defense of "GNU/Linux" and Stallman's definitions of words like "operating system" and "freedom" comes from either GNU themselves or GNU supporters - hardly NPOV. Wikipedia on its own is not considered a very reliable source, especially on contentious issues - although in this case I don't think it's really preventing itself as authoritative.
They are wrong and incompetent.
Ignorance has little to do with most kinds of competence. What exactly are you suggesting these people are incompetent at?
I would like to know your source of authority for considering the definition of "operating system" to be the one Stallman prescribes. See any number of "operating systems" courses taught at universities, and you will find they are almost exclusively about kernel operation and design. They are typically not about compilers, toolchains, editors, libraries, or even shells. Stallman consider an "operating system" to consist of software that is useful to a wide audience, but that reckoning is itself subjective and therefore unsuitable for definition. As far as I'm concerned, an operating system need only contain the minimal infrastructure to allow a user to launch non-embedded software programs, perhaps simultaneously. All that's necessary for this is a kernel and at most a shell.
I'm not trying to downplay the significance of GNU, but I think that the GNU project is out of touch with exactly is important. They like to play up the amount of GNU code Linux distributions contain, but just because GNU has all sorts of projects under its wings that are easy to get into distros doesn't mean that this is the software that can be considered "most useful." I would say that for the typical end user experience, not a lot of GNU software is really even coming into the picture. The Linux kernel will be at the core of operation, with a window server such as X11, and a window manager - this may be GNOME, but it may also very well not be (as on Pandora). The common programs from here are more likely to be those such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Open Office, media players such as mplayer and Audacious (okay, just using two examples), Windows programs through WINE, various games, and so on. In other words, it's connectivity (internet clients), productivity (word processing and design), entertainment, and gaming that people care about in a software system, and most GNU software is not at the forefront of this. I would say that the only major exception that feels very necessarily central in the Linux experience is glibc, which is also far from exclusive on say, embedded platforms (there's ucLibc, newlib.. often deployed on embedded Linux).
GNU's role today is most prominent in developing software, which is essential but disconnected from the end user experience. If anything, being able to call Windows an operating system divorces the requirement of many of the functionalities GNU believes an operating system must have. I understand that this is the "Unix model", but that's hardly an all encompassing thing either, and you can very much have a POSIX system without having the level of system software GNU presents.