The Windows NT v6 kernel (Vista, 7, 8) is certainly a lot better than XP was; it's still less aggressive about caching than Linux, and generally slower on some sets of operations with lots of small files.

A limited number of writes that virtually no regular user will see in the useful lifetime of an SSD. There are a few exceptions, but very few people are going to be rewriting the full capacity of the disk several times every day, which is what it would take to wear down the drives in a reasonable amount of time.

We HAVE a truly abusive workload at my work (continuous build and unit tests), which had been running on older Intel SSDs -- pretty much keeping the drives at a significant portion of their write speed all the time during the workday, and some write load 24/7. When we, after about 2 years, started replacing them with newer, faster SSDs, the oldest drives were showing about 25% of their estimated write lifetime remaining via SMART and out of a pool of 16 machines the same age (and 64 total with that model of SSDs although none deployed quite as long) not a single one ever started getting write errors because of running out of spare space.

I think we had a total of 2 drives out of 80 die suddenly, but that's generally assumed to be controller failure which is usually what takes out SSDs.

Yup, at least with Windows. There are some interesting compressed-RAM drivers on Linux which let you use a chunk of compressed RAM as part of the swap, and are sometimes used on Android builds.

Really no reason to have a swap file these days, other than that Windows doesn't behave well without one; I usually shrink it to 1gb.