One of the main differences is that apt will do that for you. You made it sound like you had to manually research and ask apt to download each library, when actually you probably just typed 'apt-get install samba' and it took care of researching and downloading all that crap for you.
In Windows, that doesn't exist. The installer either bundles it for you (which can be bad if you weren't expecting it, although is usually fine) or it leaves it in your hands to find and download the correct version yourself.
So yes, not exactly the worse thing ever (still an improvement over the old DLL-HELL) but it's nowhere near how friendly a decent package manager is, either.
In Windows, that doesn't exist. The installer either bundles it for you (which can be bad if you weren't expecting it, although is usually fine) or it leaves it in your hands to find and download the correct version yourself.
So yes, not exactly the worse thing ever (still an improvement over the old DLL-HELL) but it's nowhere near how friendly a decent package manager is, either.