Sad thing is they had a product like this, Services for Unix but it was a server product that never got much love or attention. IIRC, it extended the POSIX personality to give you a true Unix environment running on the NT kernel.
A lot of people don't know that Cutler's team designed NT to support different personalities/subsystems and it originally shipped with a POSIX one, an OS/2 (text mode) one, and the Win32 subsystem.
If you put in the effort, there's no reason you couldn't use the NT kernel as the basis for a Unix OS without any Windows API whatsoever. It's a single root filesystem/object system with devices mounted in directories, etc. It goes even further, things like synchronization primitives are also mounted there.
If there was a new unix-y personality on top of NT, I'd be so happy. Win32 is saddled with such crazy baggage like MAX_PATH being 260 characters, even though the underlying OS supports 64kB paths. Arrrrgh.
A lot of people don't know that Cutler's team designed NT to support different personalities/subsystems and it originally shipped with a POSIX one, an OS/2 (text mode) one, and the Win32 subsystem.
If you put in the effort, there's no reason you couldn't use the NT kernel as the basis for a Unix OS without any Windows API whatsoever. It's a single root filesystem/object system with devices mounted in directories, etc. It goes even further, things like synchronization primitives are also mounted there.