&gt;truly awesome platform-specific-at-first apps (subethaedit, quicksilver, textmate, coda),<p>I&#x27;ve had the same thought in my head for a long time now but haven&#x27;t been able to put it the way you did; completely agree.  There was also a time when OSX supported things like .psd previews, built-in *.iso mounting, and unzipping capabilities right out of the box when Win XP didn&#x27;t.<p>This is part of what initially got me to become a big Mac fan, but as time goes on it seems that there are fewer of these unique advantages as modern Windows becomes more competitive.  This also makes me all the more disappointed to see Apple&#x27;s apparent lack of OSX advancement and shortfalls in reliability&#x2F;usability.<p>The interesting thing for me is that I never would have thought that Windows would ever be competitive with Mac again for my attention, but the feel of sloppiness in Apple software is slowly moving me back in the other direction.  Once Windows has things you mentioned like better platform-first apps, emacs bindings, and a better shell, I think I might fully commit to that switch.