In my experience, no, it's not inherent... but it probably is a little too easy to hurt Windows performance than it should be.

I personally dislike all things Apple, though I do own a Mac and iPod Touch for iOS development. That being said, one thing I really like about Macs is the way they "install" apps: it's typically just a new directory with whatever the app needs to run all in one spot. This is in stark contrast with Windows where you get directories and registry entries and sometimes shared component and so on. That leads to messy uninstalls where stuff is left behind and degrades performance over time (not the only cause, but a common one).

If you're diligent about cleaning your system then this tends to not be a big issue, but a typical user shouldn't have to do that extra work.

One other thing worth noting: in my experience, corporations tend to do A LOT of harm to performance behind tour back. They install various apps for management and tracing and such and they frequently cause issues. It's a BIG problem where I work now for sure. It's possible that's what's causing your issues.

But, assuming you have rights to, run CCleaner with default settings and see if that helps any. It's a safe thing to do that will clean up a lot of cruft and sometimes can have significant benefit to performance.

Also, I have a Surface Pro 3 and have had it since a few days after release and it's still running like a champ. I bang on it pretty hard too and install/uninstall a lot of apps. So far I've noted no degradation (I do run CCleaner every few weeks though). I wouldn't trade my SP3 for anything (save an SP4 of course!) and it's now my ONLY machine - it replaced my powerful main desktop, secondary laptop and even my Nexus 7 tablet. I still need a separate phone, but who knows, maybe not for much longer :)