Yeah, it's amazing there is just a brief flash and everything is up and running again.

When I had slightly more unstable drivers, Windows could recover from that as well. The driver would crash, screen goes black, and then back up and running again without most apps noticing (excluding games and video playback).

Indeed I’ve updated many a drivers on windows (including graphics as you mention) without a reboot required. Always needed a reboot to do the equivalent kind of updates under Linux.