My experience has been the opposite. It is much better for me to have a separate modifier key (Command) for separate things. Want to make a new terminal window? It's Command+N, not Alt+F2. Paste? Command+V, not Shift+Ins. Copy? Command+C. New tab? Command+T. None of those things are possible with Windows shortcuts. If I didn't need a shell all the time it would probably be more uniform, of course. The only really good thing about the keyboard shortcuts in Windows is the Alt+<underlined character> which I have always hoped would be part of OS X someday. (Is that what you're referring to when you say "2 or 3 basic principles?)

I definitely agree with you that Apple prefers form over function, but I don't think keyboard shortcuts are the best example of that. I could personally never get away from a Unix-like operating system, which is why Linux is really best for my needs.

People praise OS X's keyboard shortcuts for being consistent across apps, as opposed to e.g. having a different "find text" shortcut per app. They are also very strict about using CMD as the primary modifier key, as opposed to mixing up Ctrl vs Alt. This too is function, and it's something that immediately grates when you go to Windows from Mac.

What you are doing is praising Windows for letting you operate things by keyboard that are normally designed to be operated by a mouse, such as that "context menu" key they added to keyboards and which practically no-one uses on purpose. This is something that Apple minimizes by default, but which you can enable through accessibility settings and such. The fact that many Windows users expect this to be turned on by default has lead them to conclude that Macs can only be operated by a mouse.

Furthermore, "form over function" is what a lot of Windows UI looks like to me. On a Mac, a file icon in a window's titlebar is still a full reference to the file, and you can drag it out and do things with it. A file downloaded in Safari has a progressbar on its icon, and you can copy it to a different machine and open it to resume. The Windows equivalents of these things are just dead icons and broken file type associations.

The two OS'es have a radically different philosophy. But personally, I can't use Windows anymore once I realized how dumb "Ok" "Cancel" "Apply" is, as opposed to just being able to tick off a checkbox on/off and seeing the entire UI update immediately.

Is the file icon in a window's titlebar functional in a way that's actually useful to (or actually used by) anyone though? It seems to me that much of OS X's hidden and non-obvious functionality is just there to satisfy someone's incorrect definition of what would be functional for the end user.

> The Windows equivalents of these things are just dead icons.

That's incorrect. Based on your own example - Chrome and IE both have progress bars in download icons. The value of being able to transfer an in-progress download to another machine seems highly questionable to me and I seriously doubt that anyone would need such functionality on a regular basis. But, I rest assured knowing that whatever I need Windows to do, I can make it do whereas Apple typically locks down the APIs that one might need to do something different than the "Apple way".

And I think that having the entire UI update immediately after checking a box is really stupid because I cannot cancel all of my changes at once. But that's the Apple way - remove all functionality and claim that it's somehow a superior product. It's also a useless workflow for changes that might not be undoable, so it cannot be employed everywhere and now the end user has to deal with multiple workflows. Meanwhile - OK, Cancel and Apply present the full spectrum of functionality in a consistent and logical way that is not hidden from the user.