PS and PDF are two different schemas.  If you ever get a chance,
open a PS file in a text editor and then try to do the same thing
with a PDF.  You can actually edit the PS file if you need to, but
you can't do this with PDFs.  

I know for a fact, having done this myself, that without the proper
drivers, non-HP printers (i.e Lexmark) cannot render the PCL
properly.  But, and I should add, any printer can print PCL with
the proper drivers.  It's the drivers that act as the interperter.

Furthermore, it is possible to stream PS files together and create
one large file, but you can't do that with PDF files.  You have to
disassemble them to PS and then stream the PS together.  It's
something ghostscript can do, but I haven't had a reason to try it.  
I was able to take PDF files and convert them to PS so that they
would print as passthrough (no conversion required... take it and
print it).  This is, as opposed to having to RIP the PDF to MOD:CA
first.

Yeah.. I know.. too much information.. but this is what I do for a
living, that's why I know a bit about how printers work.  Or at
least how they do in the infrastructure I designed.

PostScript is human-readable. PDF is not.  Perhaps PDF is PostScript
plus extra junk (e.g. indexes), then compressed.  

PDF is gradually becoming an interchange format like HTML, where you
want precise control of the layout.

Adobe pulled off a near miracle, persuading the major font companies
to allow their fonts to be embedded in PDF files, without royalties.
There is no way to do this with standard HTML, CSS or Java. If you
include the fonts, everyone will see the document with the proper
fonts. If you don't, people without the fonts installed will see the
document with a rough approximation to the correct font using Adobe's
morphing master font technology. The document will be rendered with
whatever fonts the end user has available. They may look absolutely
nothing like the ones you used to compose the document. Only the
glyphs you actually use in the document are included. If you don't
want the bulk, the distiller will save some information about the font
metrics instead, then the viewer's reader software can warp one of the
installed fonts to create a substitute that will at least have the
same spacing even if it looks nothing like the original font.

Alas, I do not believe Windows is capable of pulling that off.  We use a
software package which converts the PDF to printable PCL using MOD:CA as
its PSF mechanism.

There are 3rd party utilities like "Printfile"[1] but I use what comes
with Windows XP pro ...

1) Windows XP pro "command prompt" :

C:\>lpr /?

Sends a print job to a network printer

Usage: lpr -S server -P printer [-C class] [-J job] [-o option] [-x]
[-d] filename

Options:
     -S server    Name or ipaddress of the host providing lpd service
     -P printer   Name of the print queue
     -C class     Job classification for use on the burst page
     -J job       Job name to print on the burst page
     -o option    Indicates type of the file
                  (by default assumes a text file)
                  Use "-o l" for binary (e.g. postscript) files
     -x           Compatibility with SunOS 4.1.x and prior
     -d           Send data file first

C:\>lpr -S jetdirect -P auto loop.ps

2) A printer icon on my Windows XP pro desktop to which I drag and drop
text, PCL or PS files from "Windows Explorer".

To create the icon:
Right click on the desktop, select "new", "shortcut"
enter the target as
%windir%\System32\lpr.exe -S jetdirect -P auto %1%

For local printers and for printers that dont know the LPD protocol, I
expect you can use the "copy /b" command with a target like LPT1: or
//computername/printername.

There seems to no Java content in this posting, my apologies for that!

[1] http://www.lerup.com/printfile/