2 - Hardware costs money, software is free. This is why I say, if they allow Vaio produce hardware that is very similar to the Mac OS X hardware, they can quickly expand their market, while maintaining a high end brand. It's up to Sony then to make sure their hardware always fits.
3 - It's not problem free till I can click and icon on my mac select what I want and click buy.
4 - People will indeed make such a purchasing decision based off 1 feature. All other things balance themselves out, so one snazzy thing makes the world of difference.
It does to Apple users, and to Apple itself.
It's not problem free till I can click and icon on my mac select what I want and click buy.
The problem is that by doing that Apple would be shutting out other venues. Did you see my link to Apple.com/downloads? It does basically what you're asking for.
People will indeed make such a purchasing decision based off 1 feature. All other things balance themselves out, so one snazzy thing makes the world of difference.
What about the people purchasing the other way around? The people who'll buy a Zune instead of an iPod because it doesn't have the same crippled feature?
Then give OS X an optional behave-like-Win-XP feature (maybe they could call it OS XP :-))
1 - Mac users like the behavior differences, and as one myself I can say there are many ways where Apple's format is superior to Windows. One of the major complaints for recent switchers is the lack of a "minimize" button, and IMHO this should not be "fixed". The lack of a full-screen button allows people to focus on sharing screen space between apps, which is something Apple does extraordinarily well and where Windows fails horribly. The inter-app cross-compatibility (allowing robust drag/drop features) is key to the Mac platform.
2 - No way. Apple makes most of their money off hardware, OS X is merely a selling point for their laptop and desktop products. Not to mention Apple is in a very good position to push hardware/software synergy like nobody else. I recently saw a demo of the Windows 7 multi-touch features, and the main thing that struck me is: "this is useless, the quality of touchscreen on 95% of tablets out there is not enough to make this useful". Apple is in a unique situation where their hardware can work precisely as well as they need, and vice versa. There's no waiting for either side to catch up like MS does.
3 - Agree, though not necessary. I wouldn't put much effort in it, but rather maybe build something that increases exposure for small-time app builders. App distribution on the Mac platform is already problem-free (unlike Windows, with is myriad of non-standard installers). This seems like a solution looking for a problem.
4 - That's going to piss a lot of people off - and I doubt anybody makes a $1500 purchasing decision based off a single "missing" feature.
Can't comment on #5, my brain is too fried :)