Just because OSX's competition is lame it does not mean that OSX is a good OS. It does have some good points but these do no have anything to do with what most "users" perceive as cool. From Cheetah to Leopard little has changed. The same limitations and annoyances exist, the strong points remain the same. Folder/application encapsulation in the Finder, unicode, Unix shell, soft/had links, localisation, XML-based properties, services, Cocoa OOP framework, logical named system folders and files etc. are great. Incosistent look&feel, same old Finder (you couldn't even align desktop icons properly for years), slow and hard-to-master spotlight search, inability to prevent "._" files written all over the place, boing balls when network or HD/CD mounts fail etc. are not.
Apple had a diamond in its pocket and a golden opportunity, in essence of being let to discard most of legacy constraints and start over without having to loose all their marketshare and community. Instead, they pull out a Micro$oft. It's true that in early development bug corrections and speed optimisations occured (e.g. from Cheetah to Puma and then to Puma), but later the only innovation Mac users got were eye candy, which frankly speaking are not that impressive or cool (from an artistic view) and bloated "feature" additions. I am not going wow. I am not a PeeCee switcher; I've been using AmigaOS when these "wowers" typed in their B/W MSDOS prompt or used one program at a time in a Mac and considered that creative.
What drives OSX is its Unix background, the integrated multimedia environment (that comes rather from external applications such as iLife and a consistent lower denominator of installed software than the OS's explicit multimedia capabilities), the incapable competition (Linux does not have desktop applications, Window$ is vulnerable and not robust), and, believe it or not, cool hardware.
Given Apple's and Micro$oft's resources OSX and Window$ are pretty lame both in theory and implementation. IMHO a group of 20 talented people, working full time and hard for 2 years (with no payment problems, deadline constraints, and non-functional requirements from stakeholders), could produce a superior product. How will it be marketed and if it sells is another story.
Nevertheless, even for me, it would be easy to study for a month (maybe less) and come up with a Bill McEwen-type OS "specification" that knocks OSX for dead. A more knowledgeble computing science guy could even come up with a "proper" OS specification in the same time period. The question is whether I would have the money or the will to implement it.
