Windows 2000 was an NT release, but Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was the last generally released DOS-based desktop OS released by Microsoft. Windows Me was released after Windows 2000 by a few months.

Right, I meant to ask for Me, as it was after 9x and still DOS, or?

Yes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000 was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market, though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS based on NT.

I used Win2000 as my main desktop for about 3-4 years back in the day. Very stable.

PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was).

It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.

I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.