As much as I hate Mac from the few times I used it for work and helping my wife I never remember paying for an update.
Also it may not be much but windows does get extra features in the yearly feature update. Recent updates brought built in winrar and the last one let you have tabs in notepad.
I don't doubt it, but that has not really been my experience. Honestly the only OS I have used that breaks things after updating is Mac... applications, printers, and drivers just don't work until the developer updates them, which sometimes can be 3-6 months after the release.
And my last one (involuntary Windows update) overwrote GRUB because of course that's what I wanted, then after the first reboot not even Windows would boot and I had to create a live USB on my old laptop instead.