My main reason for switching over to Mac back in 2002-3 was that Windows 95, 97, 2000, and XP1 were dogs. Moreover, they (ab-)used their memory horribly, and were notorious for taking the whole system down when one thread crashed. The systems required extensive amounts of time to maintain patch releases, and the patch-release process was treacherous.

OSX, based on BSD, had an architecture that allowed you to do run-time kills of processes that were misbehaving. Also, despite the Apple Tax (everything Apple costs more), the integration was seamless. There were timely and effective patch releases, that followed a predictable pattern, and had few regressions, if any.

Now. . . fast forward almost 10 years, you could almost flip those statements upside down. Lion is a patch dog, buggy across Mac's own hardware matrices, and not playing nice with a variety of peripherals that Mac themselves endorsed/supported. The patch releases have been dogs for at least 3 years now, with every other patch exposing regressions.

All the while, my XP-SP2 system has been humming along just fine. Granted, the Anti-Virus and networking are professionally-managed. Whatever system integration I need to do follows open standards, and while I used to scratch my head, the net provides the unwritten users' manuals one needs for either OS these days anyway.