JavaBrain, I know you have a great deal more experience in dealing with apple than probably any of the non Stardock people on this forum, and I agree with what you're saying (or agreeing with Craeonics) to an extent, but I believe there's more to the issue than this.
No matter how you skin up Windows to look like OSX, it doesn't look as good (though there are many skins that look better IMO). The only way that this could create a real threat to Apple is if someone got an OSX clone to compile on a x86 distro of BSD. Windows just doesn't have the underlying API to do many of the visual effects that the Mac does, at least not without taking a real hit in terms of performance.
It is my opinion that Apple have consistently followed a poor marketing strategy by clinging on to their intellectual properties with such ferocity, and that is the main reason that they play 2nd fiddle to many other players in the hardware and software industries.
I believe that if Apple was prepared to draw more of a line between their hardware and software products, then they would see a significant increase in their sales. I am confident that an x86 version of OSX would be hard to keep on the shelves, and would give Microsoft a far more realistic run for their money, in what (the desktop OS market) is frankly something that they own.
Apple's reasons for not doing this, as far as I can guess, are that this would detract from their hardware sales, but I disagree. If they spent a little less money getting product placement in every movie, and every tv show, which must amount to something in the order of several hundred million, if not a few billion dollars a year, they would be able to lower the cost of their hardware to a competitive level. Opening their platform a little, so that more than a single distribution of Linux is the only alternative to MacOS would also drive Microsoft to develop a compatible version of Windows to stake their share in this market. The additional *NIX OSes that would become available would also make it a little easier to take Apple seriously in the server market.
Apple's stubborness and refusal to move with the times (can you remember the last computer that was bundled together, hardware and software by the same manufacturer? I believe it was Commodore with the Amiga, though it could be argued that Sun still do this, along with several other contenders in the server market, their platforms are still flexible enough to allow you to run other OSes on them, the existence of a version of Windows for Alpha CPU architecture is evidence of this) has always held them back in this industry, and until they seriously rethink their strategy, they're always doomed to be a minority market. But what do I know? I'm just a humble programmer....
