From the top of my head: NTFS datastreams were introduced in Windows NT 4.0 and have been around in all descendants (excluding the win-95 descendants: 98, Me). In XP, Vista and Win 7 they're still around. As long as Windows versions support NTFS, they will support file streams. They will support NTFS for a long time to come.

The error you have is described on the page you show in your question. The type command doesn't understand streams. Use:

more < 1013.pdf:Zone.Identifier

Working with streams

Microsoft only has a handful commands that work with streams, in fact, only <, > work with streams, and thus only commands can be used that can work with these redirect operators. I wrote a couple of blog posts on alternate datastreams on how you can still manipulate streams with only these commands.

Streams will only work with programs that are designed to work with them, simply because they need to be treated specially (compare junction points, also a feature of NTFS, but the driver hides the details and programs do not need to do anything special: they just consider the junction point a real file).

When you try to open a file stream using start filename:streamname and a program says something like "illegal filename" or "file not found", and you are positive that the stream name is correct, then it's likely that the program does not support streams. I noticed that Notepad, Wordpad and Word/Excel work correctly with streams, though Word and Excel consider the files dangerous. Here are some experiments you may try.

NOTE: you seem to consider alternate data streams odd. They are odd because they are so hidden, but many major file system (HFS, NSS) have it and the concept dates back to the early 80s. In fact, originally the streams were added to NTFS for interoperability with other filesystems.