So we should use this to make life easier for Windows users, mainly? Hmm.

I think this might be helpful for teams who use an heterogeneous set of platforms to checkout and work on their code. Windows is one of them, although in this day and age it's also possible to configure IDEs to do the right thing.

Another important usecase for .gitattributes is to force some file types to be handled as binary data types instead of text, and thus support different types of diff mechanisms. Case in point, a while back there was a discussion on how to track sqlite databases in a git repository in a way that a) the database file wasn't mangled, b) git diff actually outputted changes to the database instead of random noise. This stuff is handled at the .gitattributes level.